Usual response to that is that there's a skew in Clojure related data as its community consists of mostly experienced devs.
I know it's anecdotal evidence but I'm doing Java right now because I couldn't find a Clojure job that pays nearly the same (and I already used Clojure for 5 years in production environment).
I think there are lots of problems with relying on this. As others have pointed out it could mean that Clojure devs skew more senior. An other issue with these surveys is that this factoid from Stack Overflow is a highly celebrated and oft-reposted part of the Clojure cultural canon and so Clojure developers may be motivated to fill out the survey more than others, especially if they have high income, and may even be tempted to exaggerate their income. For me, all of this is moot. In my country of Canada, there are currently 34 job postings on LinkedIn which even mention Clojure and among those, almost all of them just mention Clojure in passing, such as "nice to have: a functional language like Scala, Clojure or Haskell". Maybe among these 34 postings like 4 are actual jobs looking for people to write Clojure. For comparison, there are about 37,000 postings mentioning Python. With a ratio of more than 1000 to 1, it is impossible to argue that knowing Clojure will be more beneficial for a developer's career than Python, for instance.
Same experience here. And the irony is many of these clj jobs are from understaffed startups. So basically you end up doing like 3 men's job for 80% pay of a normal java dev. And I'm not counting cljs, most likely you'll deal with cljs as so called 'fullstack' engineer and doing like 4 men's job with one salary. Clojure is fun to program, but as a day job, that really depends..
> I've had a couple of jobs doing Clojure full-time, the problem is that Java jobs pay better.
That sounded to me as if someone said: "I had gigs working as a crane operator, the problem is that working as a bricklayer pays better..."
Not only your statement is wrong, typically Clojure devs get paid more, but you're also missing the fact that these aren't comparable trades, on many facets.
