A friend of mine (in an entirely different industry) went through five rounds of interviews with a company and got passed over for someone internal.
A little while later, the same company reached out and encouraged him to apply again. Five rounds later, and he got passed over a second time.
Fast forward two years and they reached out to him a third time. He's basically convinced that because he's black he's their token DEI interview candidate to make them feel better about themselves while internally promoting the people they actually want, but of course they wouldn't actually say that.
It’s not about feeling better but likely that the company had a Rooney rule. Your friend was how they got around that while on paper complying to avoid internal political issues.
Erlang is uniquely suited to chat systems out of the box in a way that most other ecosystems aren't. Lightweight green threads via the BEAM vm, process scheduler so concurrent out of the box, immutable data structures, message passing as communication between processes.
There's nothing unique about Erlang. I have nothing against it but other companies have built messaging systems using other platforms that work as well or better than WhatsApp.
Ive been working in Elixir since 2015. I love the ecosystem and think its the best choice for building a web app from a pure tech/stability/scalability/productivity perspective (I also have a decade+ experience in Ruby on rails, Nodejs, and Php laravel, plus Rust to a lesser extent).
I am however having trouble in the human side of it. Ive got a strong resume but I was laid off in Nov 2024 and Im having trouble even getting Elixir interviews (with 9+ years of production Elixir experience!). Hiring people with experience was also hard when I was the hiring manager. It is becoming less niche these days. I love it too much to leave for other ecosystems in the web sphere
I definitely want to become an owner and learn about the business. I've even conceived and executed projects to improve the bottom and top line revenue. That being said, as a developer in a small business, the thought is that I'm too expensive an employee to not be coding even if I had a lot of impact on my own initiatives. The thinking is that a lot of people can think about strategy but very few people can code so I get pigeonholed into just executing. This has been my experience at multiple startups at various stages of their lifecycle.
Sure, but the reverse of that is, you as the developer, are the owner, and you just hire the people to think about strategy, etc.
What you are saying is true, because coding is the high value work that relies heavily on the individual effort and productivity. The team effect of coding is effectively the sum of each coders productivity.
The business side is the opposite, it can be much lower value individual work, but the team efforts combined is exponential. If you want good software you can't really just throw more developers at something, in fact doing so can often lead to declining returns. But this is the idea behind things like SCRUM, Agile, Stand up etc. It's a way to try and figure out how to scale development by effectively just adding more manpower. It simply isn't a fit for development though.
On the business side however you can scale just by adding more people.
At the end of the day you can have excellent software that makes no money, and you can also have excellent business strategy that makes money and fails to deliver a product.
While I agree with you in that we should have more native applications that are more conscious of how much resources they're using, making that transition from Electron to Native is probably not easy and riddled with pitfalls. Unless there's a standard path, how do you sell that to your superiors in the company in terms of opportunity cost?
I imagine part of it is that it's far easier to lose your job disagreeing with your superiors in the private sector ("Not a culture fit", "Not a team player"). It's better to just go along with stuff sometimes because most of the time systemic failure takes years to manifest.
I think you're right. Within the DoD, you see a dichotomy between uniformed military service members and federal civilians. The people in uniform (especially officers, especially between years 5 to 15 of their careers) exist in a brutal up-or-out promotion system. The civilians, on the other hand, are known to be impossible to fire and can remain in their positions for life (it's hyperbole, but there's some truth to it). In general, I think you can see it in the degree to which they "[treat] their superiors like infallible god-emperors."
Thanks Ryan. You made me love Rails and to be passionate about coding. I’m still working every day in it and still love it every single day. I have a one man SaaS that is providing for me and my family for the last 9 years.
