Coming from someone who went from hacking out PHP projects to using Elixir, and only having three years total dev experience, switching to Elixir was tough. It probably took me a month where I felt like I was productive, and three before I started to understand processes and pattern matching and Gen Servers where I could really utilize them properly.
There’s just a lot that’s different. Now, I’m looking for a job and I mostly know Elixir, and it’s making it difficult to find stuff when all you really know is how to write code in a (good, but) relatively unused language.
So Elixir was your second language after PHP? If so, I would take that with a grain of salt. Learning your first programming language is really hard because it's all new. Learning your second language is really hard because it's all different. After that it gets way easier because you start being able to see the analogies and commonalities between all languages. Each new paradigm - ie. more procedural to more functional going from PHP to Elixir - is a bit of a hump as well, but still easier than from the first language to the second.
There’s just a lot that’s different. Now, I’m looking for a job and I mostly know Elixir, and it’s making it difficult to find stuff when all you really know is how to write code in a (good, but) relatively unused language.