Does anyone know how to get a lisp job? Or have any experiences to share? Its been a dream for a while for me, and I think I am possibly ready (at least with common lisp, have started doing more clojure recently though). It just seems so impenetrable to me, I don't even know how to begin to search for it.
I got mine by contributing to some niche communities, and developing open source packages.
A great foot in the door is when someone is using and likes some software that you have written. If they know it came from you, and can easily find out you're available when they're ready to hire.
Of course, that's not an option for everyone -- some people simply haven't yet had the free time or paid opportunity to make open source -- and we should try not penalize people for that. But it's much better positive signal than a job-seeker approach of "I spent person-months memorizing Leetcode medium-difficulty answers, and rehearsing whiteboard interview stage presence like a rockstar."
Beware that good Lisp-family jobs are rare, and don't tend to be highest-paying. Outside of relative pay within categories like enterprise Java-shop programmer.
(Aside: From a hiring perspective, using some beloved niche language with few jobs available is also a great way to pick up mythical "10x" hires, and retain them for a long time. :) But, more seriously, it's ethical to make sure that prospective hires for unpopular niche keywords realize what they're getting into, in the current software job environment that often assumes fad-following & job-hopping strategy, and is skeptical/derisive of people whose resumes don't look like that.)
This chart I'm looking at might be broken, because mouseover is showing median salary of exactly $96,381 for all of Scala, Elixir, Clojure, "Lisp", and F#. (But somehow OCaml and Haskell didn't get jumbled in with those.)
BTW, I'm keeping in mind that people into the fringe power-user tech might be more capable than your average bear. For example, your typical person who, somehow, got years of experience with CL, IME, is a lot more capable overall than your typical person with the same number of years using Python. So, someone taking home $150K doing a Lisp at a company that lets them might have comparable skills to someone making $500K at a FAANG. (Excluding the blip when Google acquired ITA Software, which I guess brought a bunch of CL people there.)
Haven't had an exclusively lisp job, so maybe I shouldn't comment, but... I did use CL and Clojure on the job for a few smaller things at my last two places. It's easier to find Clojure companies (and them to find you) than Common Lisp ones. You might want to peruse https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies from time to time and see if any have openings. There's other resources linked too and of course there's the reddit and discord community (such as there is) hubs. You can also see if there are any meetups in your area, that's how I almost ended up at a Clojure startup some years back.
I should have taken strategy notes after talking to a guy at my last job who got management buy-in to rewrite a lot of Java code (for android) to Kotlin and have all new code for android be in Kotlin (before that was considered the sensible default). I think that's in general a better approach for a lot of would-be paid lispers: don't wait for or look for the lisp job, make the lisp job. Whether that's doing work where the customer doesn't care what language the thing is made in, or introducing it (some have even snuck it in -- the original clojure.jar got a lot of early success that way) to an existing work place. What I somewhat remember from my conversation was that if you can make a good technical case and have at least one other person supporting you (ideally your entire dev team as was his case), it's a lot easier to sell. No one raised bogus concerns about increasing the hiring difficulty or effort learning the new system. (I say bogus because engineers are learning all the time, and huge swathes of the industry have already had to do things like migrate from ObjC to Swift, or the various versions of JavaScript and later TypeScript + all the framework churn, switching IDEs; learning and change are quite common and a non-issue.) From other Lisp company reports, getting a new hire up to speed to be productive with the team using Common Lisp is a matter of a week or two, a small portion of the overall onboarding time a lot of new jobs have. Mastery takes longer, of course, but that's different.
If I had stayed longer at my last job I would have continued to flesh out a better demo for interactive selenium webdriver tests for our main Java application after injecting ABCL into it, it seemed like the easiest vector to get more interest from my team and other teams. It kind of sucks when you're debugging a broken test and finally hit an exception but now you have to start over again (especially if you stepped too far in the debugger), especially with heavy webdriver tests that can take a long time. The Lisp debugging experience is so much better... And when writing the test from scratch, it's very interactive, you type code and execute it and verify the browser did what you intended. When you're done you run it again from scratch to verify.
