I learned recently that the other company went to zero

I would just stress to folks that red flags go both ways. If the work environment seems toxic from your experience as a candidate, chances are it will only get worse once you join.

I've recently had an interviewer tell me that "Erlang is an academic language" and promptly stop the conversation after that. That's in a company that was attempting to make distributed applications easier to write. This was both: - factually wrong; - a bright red flag that the company doesn't know their own domain as well as they think/claim; - a bright red flag that their scope is much more limited than what they claim in the job description. :shrug:

1) "The founder told me that functional programming is a joke and that I'm clearly a computer scientist and not an engineer, and told me he'd never hire me as an engineer." This sort of person intends to sleep in the bed that they make, so best to leave them to it. On the other hand... 2) I'm an Elixir guy looking for work for a few months now. I've been applying to Ruby on Rails jobs where it makes sense (it was a thing I used to do). Should I be concerned that this is the perception out there? IS this the perception out there? I've heard this attitude from businesspeople in the past (such as from Brad Birnbaum, a former boss who is now at Kustomer; this was while I was at Desk.com) at times, "I don't want academics, I want builders". He said this to me repeatedly; in hindsight he was probably trying to signal to me that I was starting to look too academic. Notably, all of the apps that…

> Anyway, I did take a non-eng role there, and it was easily the worst and most abusive (like verbally abusive, psychological abusive, generally fucked up) places I've ever worked. Sorry this happened, but it’s a good lesson for everyone: If interviewers do anything resembling “negging” in an interview, they’re trying to push your limits and see how submissive you’ll be. The founder may not have cared about Erlang. He just wanted something to attack you with. Some people think that lightly insulting people is a way to get them to work hard to prove their worth. It does work on people for a while, until they realize they’re being used and abused.

Is there something about Erlang itself that makes it an attractive FP language for you, or is it the environment (Beam, OTP)? As a web dev, I find the performance of the system and concept of the actor model appealing and interesting, although admittedly I lack an in-depth understanding. I found the language to be too high a barrier though. This includes Elixir. http://efene.org/ looked promising, but when I tried to install it, I had some issue with something being outdated. Gleam is the next thing to try, although the more I read about it the less I understand, lol.

> The founder told me that functional programming is a joke and that I'm clearly a computer scientist and not an engineer, and told me he'd never hire me as an engineer. Man, that would have left me with such a bad impression that I would have ended it right there, no matter the role. That said, I've taken jobs where I had to in order to eat, and at least one of them ended up being shit, so I empathise.