(I'm one of the founders of Latacora and reviewed the post.) If any of you are at Heart of Clojure, I'll be there both wearing my Latacora hat and my Clojurists Together hat :)

Missed your reply but we've met anyway... so all is good. Thank you for attending and sponsoring.

Btw. there is a new video from the Heart of Clojure Hallway track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEqzw6V31tk I think it really captures the great atmosphere in the community and some community leaders.

How is the job market for juniors? Functional programming jobs seems to be anti-juniors when hiring.

Sadly Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Julia, OCaml, F# and Haskell jobs are quite scarce.

For example, right now, I can only see ~50 LinkedIn EU Clojure ads. A dozen more mention Clojure but it does not seem to be the main focus of the job.

Would love to be proven wrong, though. Perhaps these jobs are sometimes not advertised via LinkedIn.

I would love for my next job to be in Common Lisp.

I do have a concern though. I see that at lots of companies the job is not a Go job or a Python job or a Javascript job, but a Go-at-Foocorp job or a Python-at-Bazco job or a Javascript-at-International-Clowns-Inc. job. What I mean is that the team have built so many leaky abstractions atop the core language, and added so many third-party tools, that the learning curve is steep and the skills non-transferable. On the one hand, who cares? We’re human, we can learn. But on the other it means that it can take significantly longer to ramp up and start delivering value than one would prefer.

What’s this have to do with Lisp? Well, while a well-written Lisp system will be faster to pick up and get started on that one in a less-powerful language (i.e., almost all of them), a poorly-written mess will be much, much slower. My concern is that I might leave a pretty good situation for what ends up being a dumpster fire — and then have to find a new job too quickly.

That's so true, you can write Fortran in any language! I've seen great Java codebases and atrocious Clojure out there.

Developing good non-over-engineered abstractions is hard. But with Lisp it's a bit easier.

Some places do abuse macro DSLs and you can end up, as you said, working on a local language with no transferable skills.

I'd say that market exists, but is kinda invisible.

I've been looking around for a junior with a passion for Common Lisp, but I have _no_ idea where to find one, especially in Germany (job's remote, but I'm currently not able to hire FTEs outside the country).

That's like asking about the job market for hammers.

Hard to say, I was always contacted directly by the team/ had other role and later it turned out I can do a fair bit of programming too ;-)