As someone who has spent my whole career in somewhat niche things (ROS, OpenWRT, microcontrollers, Nix), I think the answer for how to hire for these is not to look for someone who already has that specific experience but rather look for someone curious, the kind of person who reads wikipedia for fun, an engineer who has good overall taste and is excited to connect the dots between other things they've learned about and experimented with.

Obviously that's not going to give you the benefit of a person who has specifically worked in the ecosystem and knows where the missing stairs are, which does definitely have its own kind of value. But overall, I think a big benefit of working in something like Elixir, Clojure, Rust, etc is that it attracts the kind of senior level people who will jump at the opportunity to work with something different.

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raw_anon_1111 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

And what happens when I’m looking for that next job? I haven’t interviewed for a pure developer job since 2018. But the last time I did, I could throw my resume up on the air and find a job as someone experienced with C# and knew all of the footguns and best practices and the ecosystem. I’m sure the same is true for Java, Typescript, Python, etc.

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jacquesm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is excellent advice.

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mikepurvis 3 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks.

One nice side effect of having done this is having a small rolodex of other people who are like that.

So, like, if I had a good use case for Elixir and wanted a pal to hack on that thing with, I know a handful of people who I'd call, none of whom have ever used Elixir before but I know would be excited to learn.

	▲	jacquesm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, same here. And that has come in very handy more than once. But my merry band of friends isn't getting any younger, I think the youngest in our group is now mid 30s or so, the bulk between 50 and 60.