Finding staff is an interesting negative of Clojure to mention.
I searched for a Clojure job off-and-on for several years in the 2012-2018 timeframe. I had attended the very first Clojure/conj in 2010 and had development projects in production very soon after that - so I had some Clojure specific experience and was otherwise a reasonable candidate.
My opinion was that there were far fewer opportunities than the inner core of the Clojure dev world admitted. This opinion seems very much not shared or mentioned by others. I also think that Clojure opportunities seem more limited now than a few years ago - Clojure seems to have become one of those programming languages listed on job descriptions but Clojure isn't actually part of the job.
Never getting an offer from a Clojure-oriented job was kind of weird to me at the time because I did get lots of interviews outside of the Clojure world and pretty regular job offers from those. I never figured out why I couldn't catch an offer from a Clojure dev org.
I still have about 10 recruiters a week mail me about jobs relating to Clojure (either Clojure roles directly, or someone looking for a "functional" developer for another fringe language). It's unclear how many of these are the same handful of companies cycling recruiters (or with open reqs). At least in Chicago, it seems pretty straight-forward to get a job hacking Clojure if you have prior Clojure experience.
The other alternative is bringing Clojure to an org. You solve problems and a lot of orgs honestly don't care about the details, particularly if you're in a silo or one of the only devs. This is harder to do in an established org that already has templates for specific things, unless that org is big into containers or microservices already. I've never been hired for a full-time job as a Clojure developer (although I've had offers), but I've put Clojure into production across three organizations.
Interesting perspective from your 2018 comment - thanks for linking it.
I am fascinated by the difference between your experience and mine when hunting a Clojure gig.
When I made my comment, I was wondering how quickly someone would make exactly the response you made - no judgement intended. It's been the standard response ("I easily got a Clojure job ... <details>") I have seen for years now.
It is just a very different experience than mine. I would love to have insight into the raw numbers of (devs-who-got-a-Clojure-job / devs-who-want-a-Clojure-job).
I will also second the insight that you can bring Clojure into an org as a problem solver and did exactly that in the early days of Clojure precisely because I was in a mostly silo-oriented organization.
If I want to learn a new technology, that's been out a while, I make sure to look for jobs for it first. Just a gut check on how many opportunities are out there for it.
This doesn't work for something brand new of course, but I still do a cursory look through job sites to see what I can see.
Like for instance on Dice.com right now there are 60 jobs available. If I were interested in Clojure today and saw that, I probably wouldn't bother because I know Clojure is mature but there's not a market for it apparently.
Again, this isn't meticulous or scientific at all, just a gut check with a few searches.
Then again, Rust only has 13 jobs listed soooooo.....
I searched for a Clojure job off-and-on for several years in the 2012-2018 timeframe. I had attended the very first Clojure/conj in 2010 and had development projects in production very soon after that - so I had some Clojure specific experience and was otherwise a reasonable candidate.
My opinion was that there were far fewer opportunities than the inner core of the Clojure dev world admitted. This opinion seems very much not shared or mentioned by others. I also think that Clojure opportunities seem more limited now than a few years ago - Clojure seems to have become one of those programming languages listed on job descriptions but Clojure isn't actually part of the job.
Never getting an offer from a Clojure-oriented job was kind of weird to me at the time because I did get lots of interviews outside of the Clojure world and pretty regular job offers from those. I never figured out why I couldn't catch an offer from a Clojure dev org.