It takes time for technologies to catch on. Elixir and Rust both are relative drops in the bucket in respects to industry adoption, making it difficult for practitioners with the languages to continue using them beyond their current employment. Web development often acts as the foot-in-the-door, and Elixir's Phoenix is doing superbly well in this domain. However, Elixir's got an even more impressive position for data engineering related work.
Were all those devs picking Ruby instead of Java in 2010 ruining their careers? I doubt it. Were the devs picking Java instead of Ruby for their startups? Very possibly, many of them.
Once your business comes into contact with the market, tool productivity matters more than popularity. Popularity can affect productivity, but at the end of the day, it’s the productivity that matters.
See: https://twitter.com/logicmason/status/1371255029412233218
but is working for yc startups some good thing? like desired?
I was speaking more from a founder-perspective, but being an early employee with equity in a startup that becomes very valuable is pretty good, too.
i'll be the first to ack that popularity doesnt matter if you personally feel productive in it; but it does matter when talking about jobs and leveraging an ecosystem (which i dont know elixir's ecosystem so i cant comment on, i had not heard of Broadway / Genstage before this comment). but career-wise, i do observe that developers going after a theoretically better language routinely sacrifice a degree of industry relevance they never get back since they voluntarily enter an extremely niche subculture that for whatever reason never catches on. seen this time and time and time again and i think HN disregards this for the love of the new shiny without a balanced analysis of the career risk/reward