Don't forget about getting into conversations with RU-vid creators like Primagen etc. I got into Closure because he started showing his audience OCaml, and so I started to get into functional programming because it was a new thing that looked interesting to me.
LOL, the reference to Jamis' work is like my career coming full circle. In college I built a dungeon generator for RPGs inspired by a maze generator written by Jamis. It's funny to see this popping up 22 years later in the Clojure sphere. 😄
Regarding salaries, I believe it's just an offer vs demand thing. And I guess Cobol programmers are probably paid even better than Clojure ones 😄. I've seen this "programming in X pays better" argument back in the days applied to Smalltalk : let's hope Clojure won't follow the same long term path.