The company I work for has 7+ open remote roles, all Clojure/Script engineers. Clojure is mind-expanding but doesn't necessarily take long to become proficient in - we've hired many developers with no prior experience who've learned Clojure in no time. If you're curious, my email address is in my profile
I think this a much more nuanced question than a yes-or-no answer can cover.
Looking at LinkedIn or indeed.com with just a simple search for Clojure with no geographic qualifier (in the US), we see a very small number of listed openings - 252 over the last month at LinkedIn or 44 in the last 14 days at indeed. A plain google job search on Clojure jobs in the US returns an even smaller number.
Some of those job listings will almost certainly have Clojure listed as part of a "laundry list" of technologies and the actual job will probably not be Clojure oriented.
So just from a raw numbers perspective, the job sites to suggest that there aren't a huge number of opportunities. Comparatively speaking, there are like 60,000 Java job postings on LinkedIn in the last month.
However, if you attend a Clojure/conj (one of the "primary" Clojure programming conferences), you will find that many attendees are part of some (not super-large?) number of companies that use Clojure.
My best advice on building a Clojure career (that I failed to follow) is that a programmer who wants to make a Clojure career path is to be prepared to spend a significant amount of time trying to make connections inside the Clojure community. On top of that, you probably need to build a portfolio of project experience that you at minimum blog about and preferably speak at Clojure conferences, user groups, or meetups.
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I would gently observe that long-time Clojure developers are maybe too close to the tree to see the forest when it comes to judging Clojure career opportunities.
But I would love to be wrong about my impression of Clojure job opportunities! Perhaps fellow-HN readers could post (anonymous?) numbers of Clojure job openings for their company to give us a better idea?
But, usually better to weight technology quite low when picking what to work on. Product and company culture has much bigger impacts on your quality of life in my opinion.
I don't want to work with Spring, TYPO3, or OOUI, and all of those things have made me sad in the past. But, I really don't want to work at a company where people micro-manage, run around like headless chickens, get stressed at each-other, schedule endless meetings, or where the product is something pointless that no-one wants. Any of that stuff is bad.
I haven't used Clojure before but I have worked mostly with Elixir another niche functional language. In my experience because of the limited talent pool, most companies tend to prefer experienced candidates and if they are to take you on as a junior, you probably have to be significantly experienced in another mainstream language. It's very hard for someone to take a punt on a junior Elixir or Clojure developer who has little or no experience in any other language. Generally, niche languages are not a great bet if you are just starting out. You can of-course build the experience by working on side projects, blogging or speaking at conferences. In short its a labour of love. If you learn Clojure or in my case Elixir for the explicit reason of getting a job you might become very frustrated and disappointed. This is my experience.
Full-time in Clojure since early 2014; the jobs found me even before I had professional Clojure experience. There is definitely work out there... we have been hiring nearly continuously in Chicago for the past few years: junior, midlevel and senior alike. This took a pause for COVID-19 but I expect that to end soon.
Your mileage may vary, and I don't think the language is for everyone, but it is very satisfying to work with and it's putting groceries on the table for lots of people. (I'm happy to discuss more; contact info is in my profile.)
I work full-time in the healthcare industry writing mostly Clojure(script). I wouldn't base my entire career off it (or any one language for that matter), but there are career opportunities out there using Clojure.
