FWIW, we built a team of Elixir developers in the spring of 2014 in Austin Texas. Austin is not the bay area, it's maybe a Tier 3 startup town. And still we were able to build a great team over the course of a few months.

At the time, Elixir had not hit 1.0 and while there's a lot of overlap between elixir and erlang this is a good comparison because Elixir is a lot less common than erlang.

Here's the thing-- by having that filter of using this language-- a good language-- we self selected for good engineers because the good engineers were either already using it or were very interested in it. I for one, for instance, came to that job, relocating across the country just because I wanted to work in that language.

What company is it?

Who wants to hire some 'wah, syntax is hard' programmers?

I learned Erlang on the job when I started at an Erlang shop, in between taking care of existing php stuff. It's not super hard: the syntax is weird, but at least whitespace isn't significant.

There seems to be a pervasive sentiment that developers can't learn erlang.

There is a learning curve, and you're going to want to seed your staff with expertise (it sounds like bet365 did this), but there's no reason that a competent developer can't learn this or any other functional language.

And given the increasing usage of Erlang, it's a good skill to pick up - so if you have the opportunity to learn it as part of a job you already have, so much the better.

Yap, beware of the person who can't type a "." instead of a ";"

If syntax is their main complaint, chances are, they'll fall face first handling distributed code or supervision hierarchies.

Still better than sifting through hoards of mediocre Java programmers.

it's really easy to train someone on Erlang. And there are an increasing number of Erlang devs these days.

As far as I remember one of the Erlang design goals was to build a language that could be taught and learnt really quickly.