The Human Side of Elixir
If you follow my blog, you have probably noticed that my articles usually revolve around some deep technical problems and how to go about solving these problems using the amazing Elixir programming language. These posts usually discuss the technical merits surrounding Elixir and the Erlang virtual machine, but rarely touch on the “human” aspects of Elixir.
The goal of today’s post will be to address some of the non-technical aspects of the Elixir programming language and talk about the profound impact they can have on your engineers and your business. I’ll start off by addressing one of the most common concerns I come across when it comes to Elixir - that being that “It is hard to find Elixir developers”.
In order to substantiate the claims that I will be making, I’ll be leaning on some of my past industry experiences and will be sharing some real-world stories with you (omitting names of course for the sake of confidentiality). To give some context, I have been working with Elixir professionally for over five years now, and while I was not a junior engineer when I took my first Elixir job, I was very much still a novice when it came to the Elixir programming language. In fact, it was after reading Saša Jurić’s Elixir in Action that I actively sought out a job where Elixir would be the primary language I would develop with. You read that correctly - the Elixir language and the Erlang virtual machine made such an impression on me, that I found it necessary to seek out a job where Elixir made up the majority of my work day.
At first I thought that this story was unique to me, but as I became more immersed in the Elixir community and ecosystem, I found that this experience is actually quite common. Many of the engineers whom I work with, actively seek out Elixir specific opportunities because they enjoy the language and the run-time that much (I’ll be diving into specifically why a bit later in the post 😉). This is also supported by a recent StackOverflow developer survey where 68.2% of people working with Elixir, wanted to continue working with Elixir. For some comparisons, Go received a 67.9% rating and Javascript received a 66.8% rating.
