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Maybe you can convince people on the fringe of functional programming to accept less pay for the lure of getting to learn a functional language? Maybe it's

Maybe you can convince people on the fringe of functional programming to accept less pay for the lure of getting to learn a functional language? Maybe it's worth it if you get on-average higher quality developers because of the affinity for vague association with functional programming? There's a bunch of quality .NET developers that regularly come to the Sydney F# meetup which would imho defect in a heartbeat. Definate yes on the lure for on-average higher quality developers and potentially yes for less money. Hiring directly from Meetups is the exact strategy Walmart Labs did w/nodejs to obtain quality talent that otherwise would not have considered them (Walmart [has|had] a image problem) - http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-walmart-labs/ http://todogroup.org/blog/why-we-run-an-open-source-program-...

ghuntley 11y ago
There's also FunctionalJobs (http://functionaljobs.com/ http://functionaljobs.com/) which is a job board specifically for developers that use or want to use functional programming. Browsing the listings you can specifically see which companies that are definitely using niche languages and hiring from meetups as an talent acquisition strategy.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I actually used Functional Jobs to locate a job with an established company that was creating an internal team set to use exclusively a functional language. My experience was not good at all. It turned out that they meant that they had acquired a start-up that made their own proprietary functional language (from scratch, not even building on the parser or lexer or anything from previous languages). The team also said, with a straight face, that they didn't believe in unit testing -- like, they didn't believe that it was even in principle a reasonable thing to do at any time. It really opened my eyes to the fact that when someone claims their team uses "exclusively functional programming" that person actually may not even know what immutability or algebraic data types are. I had always been working on an assumption before that there was a vague correlation between wanting to work with functional techniques and being a quality-minded engineer -- but my experience after getting a job from a place that posted on Functional Jobs totally changed that. I try to be way, way more skeptical now, which is why I am quite skeptical that Jet is using F# more as a hiring trick than as a true engineering ethos.
ghuntley 11y ago
EDIT: Two attendees of the Sydney F# user group have now since announced they are moving to NYC to join Jet.com.

ghuntley 11y ago

There's also FunctionalJobs (http://functionaljobs.com/ http://functionaljobs.com/) which is a job board specifically for developers that use or want to use functional programming. Browsing the listings you can specifically see which companies that are definitely using niche languages and hiring from meetups as an talent acquisition strategy.

p4wnc6 11y ago
I actually used Functional Jobs to locate a job with an established company that was creating an internal team set to use exclusively a functional language. My experience was not good at all. It turned out that they meant that they had acquired a start-up that made their own proprietary functional language (from scratch, not even building on the parser or lexer or anything from previous languages). The team also said, with a straight face, that they didn't believe in unit testing -- like, they didn't believe that it was even in principle a reasonable thing to do at any time. It really opened my eyes to the fact that when someone claims their team uses "exclusively functional programming" that person actually may not even know what immutability or algebraic data types are. I had always been working on an assumption before that there was a vague correlation between wanting to work with functional techniques and being a quality-minded engineer -- but my experience after getting a job from a place that posted on Functional Jobs totally changed that. I try to be way, way more skeptical now, which is why I am quite skeptical that Jet is using F# more as a hiring trick than as a true engineering ethos.

ghuntley 11y ago

EDIT: Two attendees of the Sydney F# user group have now since announced they are moving to NYC to join Jet.com.