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.)
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.)