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Ask HN: Where do all Clojure devs work?

6 points by thisiswrongggg ↗ HN
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?

5 comments

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lemon_bottle
Me on the other hand got interested in F#! How does it pay so much considering it's just another .NET (CLR) language at par with C#? Can I benefit by learning F# as a .NET developer?
dagw
I suspect that causality might run the other way. The sort of .NET developers that bothers to really learn F# tend to be among the very best .NET developers, and would probably be earning basically the same no matter what language they develop in.
fingertoe
I am a clojure dev who has been in the community for 8 or 9 years, these are my observations:

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.

clusterhacks
Sounds like you have several experiences as a Clojure job seeker. Has that been driven more by your personal Clojure network or kind of scatter-and-spray applying to jobs that list Clojure as a possible skill?

I ask because I occasionally look at Indeed or LinkedIn to see if I can get a feel for the current Clojure hiring market. The results of those searches seem to be trending downward for me over the last few years. Which doesn't mean there are fewer jobs than before but makes me question if more folks are Clojure job searching on various Clojure-focused resources instead.

clusterhacks
There were only 658 responses for Clojure out of 35,695 respondents - see (hover over the data points - for example, Java had more than 10,000 respondents):

  https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-and-experience-by-language
My guess is that many of these 658 Clojure respondents are highly experienced engineers. I bet that if we took the raw data and looked at say, the top 1,000 Java respondents by experience that most of the salary differential you see would probably disappear?

I think "niche" language developers may be not only experienced engineers but are also be the type of engineer who is actively seeking out "better" ways of building software. In other words, a programmer seeking to improve their craft and to think critically about the tools they use for software development. This type of self-analysis and self-criticism probably leads to being a better developer. Maybe similar to musicians? I think we all know musicians who can play a few songs from what amounts to muscle memory but we all also know a much smaller number of musicians who are deeply creative and skilled - in my experience, the primary difference between the two types of musicians boils down to time and some form of deliberate practice.

Stack Overflow makes the raw survey data available via CSV. I'm going to download it myself and dig a bit - others can do the same.

Oh, early in my career I was very hung up on the idea that specific programming language skills were the key to making that higher pay. I now believe that being highly paid has very little to do with specific programming language skills beyond some relatively low floor of competence with the language. There is some luck in making a high salary but generally you have to work for an org willing to pay high salaries, be visible to people making salary decisions, and then make actual valuable contributions. Of course, there are also people without those results who climb the salary ladder by simply understanding the organizational politics of how to move into higher paid positions.