Elixir shops are learning quickly that the best bet is probably to hire a senior dev that wants to learn and just give them a couple of weeks to learn.

As for the surge in interest, I can’t speak for everybody but when I dove into the language I realized it addressed virtually every short term and long term problem that I’ve experienced in my programming career. The rules it sets out force things to be done in such a way that many issues are avoided as a by product.

I find it balances all of my concerns better than anything else (productivity, performance, maintainability, scalability, learning curve, concurrency, stack simplification, capability, refactorability).