clojure is everywhere in fintech - nubank, guaranteed rate, kroo bank, griffin, pennymac, two sigma, dividend finance, treasury prime, gravie. Other big areas are healthcare and midmarket adtech. And of course startups outside of SF/NYC with smaller seed rounds looking for tech advantage - midwest USA, Europe/UK, Latin america
The further you get from silicon valley the more clojure you see — anyone with a network at FANG spent the last 10 years trying to break in and get that huge salary, which means conforming to the recruiting process, i.e. spending your time off grinding leetcode instead of learning new PLs
Speaking from past experience at Guaranteed Rate, management (probably not developers) regrets that experiment. They’ve laid off most of the clojure devs I know of there (I’m sure one or two remain for legacy services.)
I interviewed at Two Sigma like 6 years ago and I was interested in doing Clojure professionally so I asked about it and was told that they had stopped all new development in Clojure
Doesn't this ignore the reality on the ground that Clojure is a niche (but wonderful) programming language that offers very few career opportunities? It simply isn't big in any specific domain.
I also don't buy that you see more Clojure the "further you get from silicon valley ..." without some actual (or even anecdotal) data to support that claim.
I'm not saying there are zero instances of Clojure in production systems. But it is hard for me to think that it represents a large number of professional employed software engineers. The 2023 StackOverflow survey show 1.38% out of 67,053 respondents in their "most commonly used programming language" section naming Clojure. That is less than 1,000 developers. The public university I work at graduated 500+ CS undergrads in 2023. I would bet $100 that zero of those got a first job that paid them to write Clojure professionally. I would bet $1000 for less than ten grads. I would bet $50,000 for less than 25.
I'm not trying to be cute but don't you think there are less than 10,000 software engineers in the US (maybe the freaking world) who primarily write Clojure code in their day job?
Because I'm curious, job searches at the company site of your list for 'clojure':
Nubank - enhum resultado com a palavra "clojure" encontrado (no results)
Guaranteed Rate - no results
Kroo Bank careers page - no tech listings currently
Griffin - open listing for software engineer (London or Remote within the UK, Germany, Sweden or Ireland) - description: Our backend stack is Clojure, FoundationDB, Kubernetes and AWS. Our frontend stack is CLJS, Reframe, Reagent, React, Stitches, Storybook, and Playroom.
Pennymac - Sorry, no jobs were found that match your search criteria.
Two Sigma - No jobs found
Dividend Finance - 0 JOBS FOUND
Treasury Prime - There are no current openings. (for software engineers)
Gravie - Lead software engineer position - description: Advanced programming experience in multiple programming languages ( Java, Kotlin, Groovy/Grails, JavaScript/TypeScript or Python) along with Clojure/ClojureScript or another functional programming language
Indeed.com returns 15 jobs posted in the last two weeks (US) for the Clojure keyword. LinkedIn returns 34 job posting in the last month (again, in the US).
I love Clojure - it has always "worked" in my head as a language to solve problems in. I was at the first Clojure/conj. I have deployed production code that I wrote in Clojure. Clojure made me a better developer in other languages.
But in the big picture for professional software engineers, Clojure might as well not exist.
Honest question: what domains?