Re:So you're using a weird language
by scarface74 on Thursday October 06, 2022 @01:41AM
(#33104758)
20 years ago, Java was already becoming pretty big in the enterprise. Today there are plenty of Java jobs from your bog standard banks and insurance companies all the way up to the BigTech companies. The biggest ponds don’t have fish using Erlang.
BTW, what languages do you think all of those BigTech companies that pay well are using?
I just keep bringing up C# because that’s the language I have the most experience with. But substitute $any popular language.
Certainly not C#, lol.
Even OCamls share would be bigger within big tech, thanks to Meta.
C# is much bigger then OCaml. Even F# is bigger than OCaml!
(and I say this as a big fan of OCaml)
> within big tech
I saw that and C# is still bigger, largely due to Microsoft.
Re:So you're using a weird language
by scarface74 on Thursday October 06, 2022 @01:58AM
(#33104870)
I work in BigTech now. In the last two years I’ve done projects in C#, Java, Go, Python and Typescript…
Erlang might be slightly more obscure, but there are plenty of big household names using the language - Klarna, Bet365, and William Hill are all household names. And that's excluding the obvious cases of Ericsson or WhatsApp.
Re:So you're using a weird language
by scarface74 on Thursday October 06, 2022 @09:49AM
(#33108125)
Except for WhatsApp, from what I can find on Levels, all of the companies you named pay on the low end of even enterprise dev salaries.
If the incentive is to ship product then choosing the language you already have a team for makes the most sense.
If you are choosing based on hiring a new team, then the current flavors work. 20 years ago that was Java. Today it's C#. 20 years from now it'll be something else.
If you are a developer looking to grow a resume for the next job, then it's a double-edged sword. Sure it's easier to get a C# gig. But it pays less because you're in a bigger pool. It's harder to stand out. Conversely it's harder to get say a Cobol gig. But it's easier to build a profile in the Cobol community (simply by being under 80 years old) and there is a Lot of work around, and is very well paid.
Equally something that's marginally popular now will have a long tail and can be very lucrative. Erlang might be obscure, but there are plenty of shops who would love to pick up another experienced, capable, erlang developer. You're a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
So yeah, language is like most things, dependant on your point of view. That's why we gave so many of them.