Rails might be 90% better for webdev than the rest while Elixir might be 95% better. Talk about diminishing returns.
Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries.
Of course, you also have that to some degree in Rails but it is much less pronounced.
I feel like the sentiment of “we can train a competent dev in our language and stack” has given way to “we want a dev with proven experience in our language/stack” over the last few years. I suspect this has something to do with more non-technical staff being put in between candidates and the engineers they’ll be working with during the hiring process. These non-technical staff rely on “x years of experience in thing” to know if a person might be competent at that thing.
I think that this is one of the reasons networking is becoming more and more important, because it lets a candidate demonstrate their generally-applicable development skills to a fellow engineer who is capable of making qualitative engineering judgements.
> Is this actually a problem you see? I'm going on 15 years in the industry and haven't seen any issues training people up on a new language in just a couple months.
Some years ago the largest company using Elixir in the US, or at least on the west coast, abandoned Elixir because they couldn't find enough developers.
Yes. The adoption is poor despite the loud voices.
That's so disappointing to hear. I have an intern who hadn't touched Elixir 4 weeks ago who is already making meaningful PRs. She's done the PragProg courses and leans a bit on Copilot/Claude, but she's proving how quickly one can get up to speed on the language and contribute. To hear that a major company couldn't bring resources up to speed, to me, shows a failure of the organization, not the language or ecosystem.
The Ruby on Rails project I'm currently involved in doesn't struggle with training people, but rather with retaining them. There have been a few instances where we trained a junior developer and got them up to speed, only to lose them within a year. For small teams, this can be quite frustrating and disheartening.
This issue might be partly due to the project being in a somewhat niche and conservative industry, so there are no startup vibes. However, since they started looking for someone ready to make a longer commitment than a developer who has just started their career, things have improved. But this approach also limits the pool of available developers.
It's worth noting that we also use Elixir in this project (the chief architect is quite fanboyish about it), but we have never had any new developers come in with pre-existing knowledge of Elixir.
> Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries.
Is this actually a problem you see? I'm going on 15 years in the industry and haven't seen any issues training people up on a new language in just a couple months.
If you need an expert in some library or language to make meaningful business progress I feel like that says more about whatever tool or language you're using, and I simply don't see that with phoenix or elixir in the years I've worked with it.