Clojure is really good at self-selecting for people that really care about innovation in programming languages. The other jobs in a tech company care about innovation in their domain. They rarely align.
So for every weird, cool innovation you see, the productivity is immediately lost because people equally care about how you deal with state on app startup, or routing, or database interaction. And since none of those other things move the needle much in how you compete in your business domain, competitors who are not concerned wind up eclipsing you. While you're arguing integrant vs. mount, people are just running dotnet new and bikeshedding over things closer to the business domain.
PMs/EMs/QAs/etc. may not have technical knowledge, but they smell something off about programmers arguing about what library to use for routing. Why didn't people complain about this at their past jobs? Surely if it was important, it would have come up. They just perceive you as having hired a bunch of senior people who are incredibly slow relative to their past companies. It really breeds resentment.
I have seen clojure-first companies creatively hive off parts of their engineering org to have a separate org that is allowed to use a different stack. They're not super transparent about it to avoid a big exodus of people, but I've personally seen it happen more than once.
> Clojure is really good at self-selecting for people that really care about innovation in programming languages. The other jobs in a tech company care about innovation in their domain. They rarely align.
To me it seems people typically like Clojure because of its simplicity, stability and productivity with the REPL. There are innovations in Clojure (its data structures, transducers...) but overall it is a pretty conservative and minimal language with laser focus on pragmatism.
Also in terms of slowness it seems the opposite is the case from my limited knowledge. OS authors and contributors seem to be extremely productive and creative. There are some notable Clojure shops (see: OP) that have been growing at an incredible pace.
Maybe I see this differently because I come from a [insert two very popular languages] background where everything breaks every couple of months and the culture is severely fad driven. To me Clojure is refreshing, calming and more powerful on top.
Sometimes with time SW based companies seem to migrate towards "easy to hire maintenance devs" style stuff once the products mature and slow down. It seems to happen to Ruby and Python projects too. But you might not have gotten it built in the first place if you started that way.
(Though I don't think Clojure is really "innovation in programming languages" stuff, it's a rather straightforward Lispy language and has changed much less than eg Java, C#, JS in the last 15 years, and is simpler too)
