im 16 yo, which thinking about jobs and my future because soon i will 18 yo
so i so much love NixOS and considering sys admining but after NixOS it will be hell on non-Nix system
also i wanna(or not) learn Rust(seems like impossible as junior, maybe Golang?)
also im scared because i live in russia and job market there is awful(everywhere is awful today), can i get REMOTE job in EU but as i said outside-EU or in any other country
just discussion im confused
I wish!
I’ve been using NixOS for years and haven’t once seen a company hiring (other than IOG and Anduril 
) that uses it. Everyone else is spinning their wheels using Docker, pretending a Docker image is deterministic while hating on Nix users any chance they get.
A little bit outdated, but try GitHub - ad-si/nix-companies: Curated list of companies that use Nix / NixOS in production · GitHub
NixCon/PlanetNix sponsors are also a good source!
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Every now and then a job shows up on the forum, usually EU. The tricky part is Russia. No telling what global politics will be like in 6 months, let alone 2 years. And for as much as I love Nix, I think it’s missing a lot of what commercial tech companies demand from operating systems, containers, and build tools, and package managers.
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There definitely is more and more incremental adoption, so you may eventually end up working in a company that uses nix, but it’s unwise to bet your life on it.
In this industry you’ll be switching jobs constantly, especially if you live in a less stable country (where even is stable these days?), so focusing on a specific niche tool or language won’t be very helpful. You need to understand things shared by many companies.
nix is fundamentally more of a devops/infrastructure topic, it doesn’t have much to do with programming.
If devops is what you like doing, interest in nix is cool and may land you the occasional opportunity, but the reality is that it’s not the industry standard. If you want to maximize your employability, you should have extensive knowledge on kubernetes. Ansible is slowly evaporating, but most companies will have legacy ansible stuff to migrate, so even that will probably still be useful 5 years from now.
Even if you do land a job that likes nix experience, the other skills will still be more fundamental, either to maintain old infrastructure or to provide interoperability. Nix-based solutions are typically still deployed on k8s-based platforms; the nix ecosystem does not and will never have an equivalent to AWS.
If devops isn’t what you like doing, nix is next to useless. Devex roles are rare, don’t hire juniors, and where they exist their goal is to minimize how much developers have to understand about tools like nix. You’d be boxing yourself into a very tiny niche.
If you want to go into programming, you should learn C++/Java/go/Rust (in that order) long before you delve deep into nix.
Nix can be useful for an already-senior developer who wants to solve specific problems. It serves a supporting role next to some other main activity. A sufficiently senior developer won’t really struggle picking up new languages and tools, anyway, though.
Learn to program in a couple of languages, skill up on Linux sysadmin work first, and write some cool tools from scratch. Nix can come later. Using NixOS is probably not bad at teaching you some of these skills, but you may still be better off with Arch or Gentoo for a few years, just to learn how more standard environments work.
This is not to discourage you from using nix, just don’t prioritize learning everything about it over everything else.
Most importantly, though, avoid LLMs like the plague they are. I see how little people learn and understand when using them around here every day. You already know how to use them; make sure you’re one of the few young adults who can still understand things independently 5 years from now.
It’s not just “LLMs bad”, I’d have given you the same advice about stackoverflow 5 years ago; it’s just much easier to get a specific, treat-the-symptom answer that doesn’t understand the long-term at all nowadays.
Also consider a career in some other not-mainly software field. You can still program in many other fields, and IME software companies rarely care whether they’re hiring a computer scientist or a phycisist. Having wide experience helps, and specializing in software later is much easier than other fields because materials are so cheap and readily available.
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Hear hear! I might disagree on the langs slightly. From a career perspective your choices make a ton of sense. But if you learn C/Java/Haskell/Rust you’ll have a much more well rounded knowledge of PL that you can draw from to make learning new languages easier. Learning something like python or javascript after you know about those languages becomes quite simple. C++ is a beast, nobody truly learns it, they just learn to use it. But ask 5 different programmers and you’ll get 5 different opinions.
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Make sure you have notifications turned on for Jobs .
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From my experience (I dont work in IT) stick around here, maybe try applying for Summer of Nix, work on low level nix issues on tracker, ask around matrix rooms about these issues, try meeting nix users in person at a local meetup or convention. Build networking, share love of learning. Maybe talk about your journey with nix at a local meetup. People do like to hear when someone is enthusiastic about something.
I made small contributions to nix documentation here, nix, had great conversations and advices from people here. I was initially surprised how helpful some powerusers here are, they didnt just help but gave me extra feedback and how to learn more and what to work on.
I applied three times to Summer of Nix and didnt get in but had great time learning and preparing for it. I talked with people about Nix at a local meetup in my town. I made a youtube channel where I documented how I learn and made some tutorials. Great way to meet people and motivate yourself.
This year my lifes circumstances have changed a bit and I had to stop using Nix for this year but eventually I may return to it.
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There are a growing number of jobs available involving Nix. I’d say the main skills you should work on and that I look for are:
- Ability to manage and maintain a large package set: contribution and release management with Nixpkgs is perfect experience.
- Understanding how Nix works at various levels; the store, language, module system, package scopes and overlay architecture, evaluation, fetching, substitution, building, usage in CI and testing.
- Non-Nix: understand build systems and how to make disparate chunks of the software ecosystem work together. In an age where writing code is getting cheaper software composition becomes more important.
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