Erlang and the telecom market

The generalist view is that nobody is using Erlang for modern telco workloads anymore.

(yes, there are exceptions. Bear with me)

I learned Erlang when we were programming Ericsson voice switches some twenty years ago, and even though Nokia also adopted OTP and did some pretty amazing things with it (including a Hadoop analogue that used Erlang to coordinate Python workers across nodes), I have only come across Erlang when looking at legacy workloads that needed to be moved to the cloud.

NFV and CNF efforts (i.e., virtualized and containerized network functions) I've come across over the past few years seem to be mostly Go or C++. Jaeger is a common tool. I see a lot of Postgres. I also see really weird CNI approaches (check out multus, because telcos still can't get over having dedicated network interfaces for things even though it's all just a virtualization sandwich and they really should just learn to use network policies).

The technicalities run deeper than web apps (because some thing are very, very finely tuned), but the key point is that the telco "bleeding edge" landscape is now indistinguishable from "web scale" K8s discussions, except that telco workloads demand fixed resource allocations nd we still rely _a lot_ on CPU pinning of specific functions due to latency/jitter sensitive workloads.

It's almost like you took low-latency, pseudo-real-time stuff from embedded systems and shoved it into K8s. No, wait, it's _exactly_ like that.

Source: I work in Azure for Operators and have been in the telco industry since the mid-90s.

> screw Elixir by the way

This is 100% what is keeping you from getting hired. Folks who use BEAM don’t care if someone is using Erlang or Elixir or LFE or whatever… we care about the problems. This is why we are all on BEAM to begin with. Your immaturity shows you lack the experience to meaningfully understand this. You’re still obsessing with the superficial instead of the problem. Almost everywhere using BEAM is going to be dominated by senior+ engineers who just don’t want to put up with someone who is so assuredly lacking experience.

Your hubris is stunning by the way, to not see your attitude is the problem, I can say I would absolutely never want to work with you… and I’ve been writing for BEAM professionally for 7 years, software development for 15+ years.

This is the problem I have with Erlang developers. They only want to work on Erlang. Pragmatism be damned. It is never about the product or the company. It is only about which of the remaining 20 Erlang expert personalities in the world do they get to work alongside with. If there needs to be a special library, all other existing ones are garbage unless written by one of the 20 above, so they will just write their own. I hate to stereotype here, but I would never ever (again) bet my company on Erlang. It is insanely difficult to recruit for. They are truly some of the best developers in the world, but lack pragmatism for problems and every one problem can only be solved with functional programming using Erlang. In my experience, Erlang developers are Zealots for the language and nothing else. If your company decides to pivot away from Erlang to another more accessible language, say Go, you are likely to lose them all.

> screw Elixir by the way

If OP is reading… care to elaborate in a more objective fashion?

As an Elixir neophyte, one of the things that is a small frustration for me is that you’ll get to a problem and there just is no solution, and when you ask on the wonderful slack channel, someone will pipe up with a bit Erlang you use for that. It’d be like learning Japanese, and for sizeable pieces of your communication, your instructed to go next door to the Latin class to figure it out.

As near as I can tell, there is no such thing in the real world as a “just elixir” application. Any shop/product of size would probably love to have your Erlang expertise, provided they didn’t feel you were hostile.

> screw Elixir by the way

Not the attitude I'd be hiring for honestly.

By not using the word Telecom.

Discord, fintech, and sportsbetting also use BEAM pretty heavily.

Also 100% would avoid hiring you with the elixir comment.

Could you work near UTC+1 timezone? ["info",$@,"treesat.io"]. Otherwise, like other commenter said, get lucky, in Europe there may be more job postings than USA.

Have you considered these guys yet? https://www.2600hz.com/careers

@fantarina If you look for a job, can you please send me your CV? we use Erlang. https://www.thesignallingcompany.com/

Stan@thesignallingcompany.com

I wouldn't be too quick to be down on Elixir. The entire BEAM ecosystem (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, Luerl, LFE etc) are great! I think one could potentially sneak some Erlang into an Elixir job by building common libraries you want to share with other programming languages across the BEAM.

I don't get the hate for Erlang, either. It's a fun language with a community very willing to help folks out.

I really like Erlang as a language and OTP as an idea, but have never used it professionally. I'd assume that there exists a relatively close-knit community of practitioners in the world, similar to other "niche" languages like Clojure, so I would start there. It could be a mailing list, a website, a discord server...but I'm sure its out there.

Demand for Erlang is non-existant even within Ericsson and that's the company that invented the language.

Could try for a vFabric/RabbitMQ support roll at NetSuite, Red Hat, or Blackfriars Group.

Also, Elixir subsystems in Erlang are common, so projecting ones preferences onto an employer may earn less utility or more ire.

Best of luck =)

Unpopular opinion but yeah screw Elixir but that's not the topic here. To put it bluntly you won't find an Erlang job, better forget it and go the python/js/php way

Quite curious indeed that both OP and _all_ the commenters who agree with "screw Elixir" are green users...

try athonet, they do telco and use erlang, they are moving more towards elixir nowadays so that might be a show stopper for you though