Erlang developers in Australia are rare?

[beng...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

The company I work for has position(s) open for Erlang developers. (We've decided to use ejabberd/MongooseIM.)

However, it seems like Erlang developers in Australia are a somewhat rare species?

Any ideas or suggestions on how we may be able to find them?

(And no, I intentionally have not posted our job description here because I don't want to be accused of posting unsolicited email.)

Related question ... how active is the Erlang community in Australia? This group was the best I could find ... and even it seems a bit quiet.

Thank you,
Beng Tan

[Tim McGilchrist]

Hi,

I think you'll find that Erlang developers in Australia are extremely rare. There aren't many jobs around for them either.

We had a small meetup group in Sydney, which has fallen quiet as I found I had less time to organise it. You're welcome to post to that group http://www.meetup.com/Sydney-Erlang-User-Group/ to reach out to interested parties in Sydney.

Outside of that your best bet would be to contact the various Functional Programming groups in the capital cities, I'm really only familiar with Brisbane and Sydney groups, but I'd expect something similar exists in Melbourne. Depending on your company's view on hiring overseas the erlang questions mailing list might also be worth trying.

Regarding how active the Erlang community is, there's a handful of people in Sydney with more interest in Elixir from the JS and Ruby people I know. I'd say it's fairly quiet, and with the job prospects being fairly close to zero in Australia I don't really see that improving hugely. Having said that it's a great language, which I like very much.

Cheers,

Tim

[OJ Reeves]

Erlang developers are rare across the planet, we just feel it more down under :)

+1 to what Tim has already said. The few people I knew in AU that had Erlang experience have either moved overseas to places that actually foster innovation, or have left the development world for one reason or another. Only a couple seem to remain, even fewer are active in any sphere that I currently monitor. It's a shame, and I'd love to see it change.

Elixir may just change things, but it's still early days, and many of the Ruby fans have moved onto to Node... where they deserve everything they get :)

Best of luck trying to find some folks!

OJ

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OJ Reeves | @TheColonial | +61 431 952 586 | http://buffered.io/

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[beng...@gmail.com]

Hi,

Yeah, it doesn't look good. We're going to have to either look overseas, or look for generalist backend developers and then see whether they want to pick up Erlang.

Elixir is a bit young to be using in production, IMHO. Maybe a couple more years.

Thanks for your replies.

Beng Tan