<story><title>Boring Technology Checklist</title><url>https://blog.begin.com/posts/2022-01-27-the-boring-technology-checklist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect?&lt;p&gt;When it comes to programming languages, I&amp;#x27;d stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn&amp;#x27;t hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.</text></item><item><author>TacticalCoder</author><text>Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s familiar in that it both &amp;quot;supports popular language runtimes&amp;quot; (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it&amp;#x27;s a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; long time.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven&amp;#x27;t been updated in &lt;i&gt;years&lt;/i&gt;.  There&amp;#x27;s also very little code churn inside Clojure&amp;#x27;s own codebase.&lt;p&gt;It is very reliable.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s limits and trade offs are well known.&lt;p&gt;Somehow I though my language of choice was &amp;quot;edgy&amp;quot; but I realize it may actually be &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot;: a dialect from a very old family of language running on top of a boring tech (the JVM).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olieidel</author><text>When hiring &amp;#x2F; recruiting Clojure devs, there are quite a few second-order effects which are quite unintuitive.&lt;p&gt;Clojure devs are much more senior - they&amp;#x27;ve typically been burnt by at least one tech stack, often more (Java, JS + React, Fortran, Cobol, punching tape, etc.). Clojure devs also tend to be really passionate about, you guessed it, Clojure, which commonly turns out to be a good thing. People passionate about that level of language-detail tend to be meticulous about many other useful things, like choosing the right tools and building simple and maintainable applications.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s sometimes a slight tendency towards over-engineering which is understandable. People who dive deep into other programming languages and go through the pain of learning lisp sometimes tend to lose focus of the actual (business) problem to solve. But I wouldn&amp;#x27;t say this tendency is significantly higher than elsewhere. Still, sometimes, the pragmatism of a rails dev just churning out code is missed.&lt;p&gt;Also, because Clojure jobs are scarce and there&amp;#x27;s a high number of &amp;quot;secret Clojurists&amp;quot; (people who code Clojure at night and secretly dream of using it at their day job), you actually get a much higher number of applicants than you would have estimated based on the most recent Stackoverflow survey.&lt;p&gt;Also, you get a real shot at hiring rockstar devs. This is huge and cannot be overstated. If you&amp;#x27;re hiring for a standard JS &amp;#x2F; Python stack, you&amp;#x27;re suddenly competing with FAANG companies and their salaries. If you&amp;#x27;re hiring for Clojure, you&amp;#x27;re hardly competing with anyone. And you get a good pre-selection of senior devs. Like, those which were burned at a FAANG company, who finally came to their senses and now want to code Clojure. What&amp;#x27;s not to like?&lt;p&gt;I guess a drawback would be that you couldn&amp;#x27;t instantly hire a local team of 100+ devs, even if you take secret Clojurists into account. But who would want to work at a place which hires 100+ devs in a short amount of time?&lt;p&gt;(I interviewed around 200 people, many of them for Clojure roles, sometimes even comparing Python and Clojure applicants for the same role)&lt;p&gt;Relevant talk: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;kNiGu_VaoTg?t=1566&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;kNiGu_VaoTg?t=1566&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Boring Technology Checklist</title><url>https://blog.begin.com/posts/2022-01-27-the-boring-technology-checklist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect?&lt;p&gt;When it comes to programming languages, I&amp;#x27;d stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn&amp;#x27;t hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.</text></item><item><author>TacticalCoder</author><text>Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s familiar in that it both &amp;quot;supports popular language runtimes&amp;quot; (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it&amp;#x27;s a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; long time.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven&amp;#x27;t been updated in &lt;i&gt;years&lt;/i&gt;.  There&amp;#x27;s also very little code churn inside Clojure&amp;#x27;s own codebase.&lt;p&gt;It is very reliable.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s limits and trade offs are well known.&lt;p&gt;Somehow I though my language of choice was &amp;quot;edgy&amp;quot; but I realize it may actually be &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot;: a dialect from a very old family of language running on top of a boring tech (the JVM).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gregors</author><text>From what I heard, Nubank hired a good deal of Elixir developers when they aqui-hired Plataformatec. I suspect having functional programming experience matters more than having concrete Clojure knowledge. It definitely didn&amp;#x27;t seem to be a problem in this case anyway.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;building-nubank&amp;#x2F;tech-perspectives-behind-nubanks-first-acquisition-deal-what-this-business-move-means-and-how-it-d7d1233c72b8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;building-nubank&amp;#x2F;tech-perspectives-behind-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>