Sorry that really doesn't add up to what I see when I look at job boards, Elixir has really poor numbers. The Ruby guys who wanted to jump ship to Elixir already did so a few years ago (some of them will continue to jump ship from Elixir to Rust or Go because hey why not). So I don't know where new growth will come to Elixir.
It's not just jobs, by any metric you can think of Elixir is an obscure tech, if you want I will add sources to this claim but hopefully we can agree.
I think people may be traumatised by what happened to Perl or Cobol. They don't want to become obsolete. In reality what happened to Perl isn't the norm imo.
PHP is the more recent one. Folks who worked in PHP but got out at the right time look at all the low-paying PHP jobs (and there are lots of them!) and see mostly-PHP-experience job candidates dismissed out of hand for higher-paying jobs that would offer work experience outside PHP and think "there but for the grace of God, go I".
PHP has declined but its by no means a dead or dying tech. Pay should be good in the good companies (Slack? MessageBird? I am sure there are some big names I dont follow the PHP world that much).
What I am saying is that even declining tech can provide stable income for decades.
Perl is a different story though. I dont know if the Perl people can still get jobs writing Perl.
Oh no, it's not dying—there's a ton of PHP work out there—it's just that most of the PHP dev market is very stagnant, wage-wise, outside a handful of companies, in a way that most languages in wide use are not. There's also a real stigma that goes along with still being mostly a PHP person these days, I've noticed. (I was one, like... 9 or 10 years ago)
Pepsico, Toyota ...come on now that's weak. They're not even IT companies let alone Tech. Whatsapp is running on a fork of Erlang afaik , not Elixir.
Look I'm not saying no one is using Elixir, I'm just saying there's little jobs that's all. Cherry picking some famous names isn't gonna change that.
It's a difficult metric, that one. In part because I get the impression that high-specificity tech like Elixir and to a certain degree Clojure attract people who, once they're in the job, _never leave_, and their productivity is high enough (if you believe the marketing) that you just don't need to grow a team as hard and as fast as you would on a more "popular" stack to get equivalent outcomes.
If all that's true, it's a natural consequence that better tools will have fewer job postings: you need fewer people to get the job done, and the ones you've got have really good retention. However, so will tools on the other side of the bell curve: nobody in their right mind wants to go there, either on the supply or demand side. So all popularity really tells you is where the enterprise hype machine was, five, ten, fifteen years ago such that "nobody got fired for choosing X" and "learn X! It's got a lot of job postings!" still align.
But the enterprise hype machine is optimised for tools that have a very specific set of surface criteria: enormous libraries so you're not inventing anything, rock-solid vendor support so there are people being paid to evangelise it into orgs (or, like JS, are ubiquitous anyway, but I think that particular lightning only strikes once), and "easy to learn" ergonomics such that developers asymptote towards replaceable cogs in both quality and quantity.
"Well respected but obscure" describes a certain sort of success, by that reasoning. It just needs enough of a community to stay alive, and that's a bit more of a toss-up. Ruby haemorrhaged people in the Rails 4-5-6 cycle as people jumped ship to node, but Rails 7 and Ruby 3 are looking extremely tasty despite that, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity over the next couple of years outside big enterprises.
Most of the people I interview have got into tech after Rails 3 was released, and generally aren't aware of why the Rails/Phoenix/Django concept was such a breath of fresh air. I think what you'll see is that the reason Phoenix and Elixir have a "next big thing" isn't technical factors at all. It'll be a rediscovery by the new generation when someone unexpected goes unicorn and the story is "it was all down to Phoenix", even when the real factors were elsewhere.
Plus these companies tend to have tens of techs stacks and hundreds of projects, you never know if what they're highlighting isn't some small internal project used by just one team and developed by more or less a lone wolf developer, with the project on life support after said developer left the company.
how about PagerDuty, Divvy, Slab? I once worked at a company where the CTO said 'elixir is an unknown quantity and I'm not sure we want to rely on it' and here we were using three critical services (one financial!) that were running on elixir.
> there's little jobs that's all
wasn't an issue for me. I applied for five elixir jobs in a limited sector (fintech) and got an offer.
Have never heard of Divvy and Slab. PagerDuty is a nice company though.
Thats still not much. You can't compare it to Go or Kotlin or Swift who are about the same age as Elixir.
It's very weird to assume I'm some dinosaur because I haven't heard of a company that doesn't even have a Wikipedia page and hasn't IPO'ed yet. We use Recurly to do subscriptions and our expenses aren't done in the U.S (maybe that's the thing?).
About Discord see my other comment - I don't think Elixir is their main language.
> Another is a re-architecture of our guilds service, which as our biggest communities have grown, started struggling to handle 100,000 connected sessions per Elixir process. We horizontally scaled the Elixir processes so that we can scale as the number of connected sessions increases... Many of our stateful services that maintain connections to clients, and process and distribute messages in real-time, are written in Elixir, which is well suited to the real-time message passing workload. But in recent years we have run up against some scaling limitations. Discord has written and open-sourced several libraries that ease some pains we’ve encountered with managing a large, distributed Elixir system with hundreds of servers
It's not just jobs, by any metric you can think of Elixir is an obscure tech, if you want I will add sources to this claim but hopefully we can agree.