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I've got managerial experience hiring (on both ends of the spectrum of talent) and engineering experience in computational finance at a prop firm similar to Jan
by iheartmemcache 10y ago
I've got managerial experience hiring (on both ends of the spectrum of talent) and engineering experience in computational finance at a prop firm similar to Jane Street. He has a fast-hire ability and high-signal to noise for sure but he works at a prop firm. His hiring practices are a market anomaly simply because he can pay effectively whatever a competent developer wants. Jane Street can basically throw money at the problem. What you have at a 'normal' company is a real difficult time finding someone who can tell me when to use a lens and when to use a zipper in Haskell who are actively looking for employment.
Anecdotal but I casually attend Boston Haskell and I can't remember the last time someone was out of work other than 'funemployment' (e.g. a startup goes bust and they have accrued more than enough money to just sit around, stretch and work on pet projects). The second they 'need' a job, they'll casually mention it and I think ~3 out of the ~7 times this has happened, someone in the crowd went like "oh Bill, yeah come in to <his office> Monday and meet our CTO". No recruiters, no wait. The CTO trusts Joe has heard Todd ask enough insightful questions consistently enough that he's going to be a good hire. Tuesday 9AM HR, 10AM pull the repo down, setup stack, start poking around Haddock and start closing the easy tickets. Good talent (10 of the 15 applicants are quality) might respond to Minsky but those other 9 guys will be picked up almost invariably in well under two weeks
- dsacco 10y agoThanks for adding more color to this!
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoThe benefit there doesn't seem to be intrinsic qualities of your language, but the benefits of a small community of like-minded individuals.
- jghn 10y agoOT but how useful would the boston haskell meetups be as an extreme noob? Will the talks be so far over my head that I should learn me a haskell a bit prior to attending or would it make for a good way to start absorbing some knowledge?
- tikhonj 10y agoI haven't gone to the Boston meetup specifically, but my experience with other Haskell meetups is that the level of talks varies significantly, both in how much Haskell you have to know and how much general math/CS knowledge is expected. If you're a beginner along both fronts (which is great: Haskell is a wonderful place to start), you might need to look at the talk topic ahead of time and choose ones which seem the most accessible. If you're just a beginner in Haskell but comfortable with general math and CS topics, chances are that many talks won't be too Haskell-specific and you'll learn something interesting even if you don't get all the Haskell details. I've attended talks about things like succinct data structures, concurrency models, FFT algorithms... etc. All of these used Haskell and Haskell concepts, but weren't just about Haskell; you would have gotten something out of them even if you didn't know much about Haskell specifically. I don't think most of the talks will be great for learning Haskell (unless that's their explicit aim) so if you actually want to learn the language you'll also need to do some reading on your own, but going to the meetups will still be valuable.
- gaius 10y agohe can pay effectively whatever a competent developer wants I think any niche language person would be delighted to be paid equivalent to Java or C# rates for their city or industry, to hack Haskell or OCaml or Lisp or whatever.