And how do they earn that much?
I'm looking at the results here
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-technologies
and see that clojure is the top paying tech with almost double the pay from java.
But when looking for clojure job ads I see very few posts (at least in Europe) and TBH most of them don't seem the high-pay shops kind.
Also weird that the top five is dominated by functional languages which again seem to be a small minority in job ads.
Some possible explanations:
1. these roles are within FAANGs (and they're not advertised as such but under more generic postings)
2. these roles are mostly independent consultants (and consequently these numbers are not too relevant if you are in a payroll)
3. because these roles are few and far between they compete for a small pool of applicants thus raising the wages (although the number of applicants don't exactly show a lack of candidates)
4. A lot of these are simply outliers in the sense that the data have not been normalized (i.e. 2 people that do clojure indeed earn that much but the whole sample is 10000 people).
How do you interpret these numbers? Do they agree with your experience?
1, Apple hires Clojure Devs. Netflix uses Clojure as well. I believe Amazon may in places. There are several other corporate 500 companies that use it in a vast minority of their projects. I asked one dev at Clojure Conj "how many developers do you work with? 100.. How many use Clojure? "No, there are 100 on the Clojure team, we have 1700 JVM developers." Typically these jobs are listed as Experience with one of Clojure/Kotlin/Scala..
2, In all of the negotiations I have had for Clojure jobs, I was offered both routes. The W2 route is often through a staffing company, or a 1099 route on your own. The compensation is pretty much a wash either route. (1099 pays more to compensate for lack of benefits). I am sure there are companies that do direct hire as well.
3, Yes, there are few developers competing for more than one would think number of jobs. It isn't difficult to train up developers to code Clojure, but it is a bit harder to find developers who intuitively architect in the Clojure way. Those guys are a pretty hot commodity.
4, Clojure devs also tend to be extremely experienced. That would mean a high salary no matter tha language.
There are a substantial number of Clojure unicorn companies. Examples are NuBank, Reify health, AppsFlyer, TaxBit, Amperity. Most of these are still under the radar in that most people have never heard of them. There are probably a lot more that haven't hit the Billion dollar mark but still have significant staffing.