33 ms·

I would like a job writing Haskell

405 points by Rerarom 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
Any blog with Robertson Davies deserves promotion. My favourite Canadian author. And I certainly hope he finds haskell work, burrito or not.
- mjd 5y ago
  Davies has showed up on my blog a few times. It's possible you will enjoy these miscellaneous notes on _The Manticore_: https://blog.plover.com/book/Manticore.html https://blog.plover.com/book/Manticore.html
  - ggm 5y ago
    Interesting. Nice notes, thanks! I liked "Leven of malice" and found myself thinking of it again recently reading "the shipping news": -the resonances of small (and not so small) town newspaper publishing in the two. And Proulx writes of similarly broken people. "A mixture of frailties" is a great read for anyone who has uprooted themselves for serious study or work, and suffers culture shock. My mum was an art historian and studied under Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld Institute so you can understand how "Cornish" read to me. If you haven't read "Possession" by AS Byatt, I think having enjoyed "Cornish" you would like it. A very different book but touching many similar concepts without the magical realism perhaps. (Academic rivalries, art history) I often think of the "putting yourself on trial" rap from "the Manticore" -my own star chamber isn't always as even handed.
xupybd 5y ago
That doesn't bode well for the rest of us if someone this accomplished can't land a Haskell job. This makes me wonder if it's been worth learning functional programming. I've put hours and hours of my free time into F#. I'm not sure that it was a wise move. That said I love F#.
- SonOfLilit 5y ago
  Author doesn't say he has trouble finding a Haskell job. If I had a Haskell blog that regularly reaches the HN front page, I'd write a "looking for a job" post there as the first thing in my search, not after exhausting all other avenues.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  All he's done is write a blog post yesterday saying "does anyone want to give me a Haskell job? I have no substantial experience in Haskell". Bit early to say he can't land a Haskell job.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    This is a very fair point.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Is it because they might be overqualified, so any company that happens to do haskell (which I can imagine aren't many) are intimidated? I mean how many people here, currently working in language X, would want to hire someone that is better than they are? I mean rationally it makes sense - bette for the company, learning opportunities, etc, but emotionally it would seriously piss me off if someone came swooping in and basically made me obsolete and look stupid. (I'm not saying the author of the article would do so, I'm just speaking in general and thinking up hypothetical scenarios)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dagw 5y ago
    but emotionally it would seriously piss me off That is why choices like that should be left to project managers. As someone who is coding less and managing more these days, I have none of that ego left. If I could hire someone twice as good as me I would do so in a heart beat[1] and then go home and celebrate my great luck. [1] Assuming they aren't an asshole etc. etc.
e19293001 5y ago
Hey, he is the author of Higher-Order Perl!
iqanq 5y ago
I would like a job watching mexican soap operas.
- pkdpic 5y ago
  Too bad all those jobs got automated.
- kozak 5y ago
  I bet such a job exists somewhere, because someone has to watch each episode of the soap opera as a QA check before it gets aired.
  - WJW 5y ago
    My wife used to work as a translator for Netflix for a while; all the episodes get cut up in chunks of a few minutes that get doled out to different translators/QA people so that the plot does not leak out.
    - azemetre 5y ago
      Wouldn't that potentially hurt the translations? Without getting the full context of the scene or plot you potentially misread some scenes.
- fortran77 5y ago
  In Haskell?
actuator 5y ago
As far as I know, Facebook has possibly the biggest Haskell deployment in form of one of their anti abuse tool.
- theK 5y ago
  There is also the Cardano ecosystem which is mainly built on Haskell and runs one of the biggest and most active blockchains ever.
  - mythrwy 5y ago
    They also have a consistent history of wildly missing delivery dates though.
  - captaincaveman 5y ago
    Hmm and there is a lot of discussion about it being a barrier to adoption. I think it is a good tech choice to be honest, I want my blockchain carefully built and audited.
- kbumsik 5y ago
  You mean, Haxl? [1] But AFAIK only a few devs are involved for the development. [1] https://github.com/facebook/Haxl https://github.com/facebook/Haxl
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    No, their SPAM filter is (yes, still) in Haskell. https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...
    - arianvanp 5y ago
      (For context: the spam filter uses the Haxl library. Yes Haxl itself has few developers; but it has many users)
  - 5y ago
ramboldio 5y ago
https://wire.com/en/ https://wire.com/en/
makerofthings 5y ago
I would love a job writing Haskell but any of the jobs I’ve seen would involve a 6 figure pay cut. Haskell is such a joy to work with.
- deepsun 5y ago
  That's sad, but fair. You pay for the joy. In other words, demand is weaker than supply, compared to other jobs, like COBOL.
haskellisameme 5y ago
throwaway4good 5y ago
In Denmark wildcat banker Lars Seier's crypto startup explicitly hires Haskell-developers: https://www.concordium.com/careers https://www.concordium.com/careers
jll29 5y ago
It's a good idea to try to find a job this way, but given that he has been part of the Haskell community for a long time one might ask "Why can't he find a job using his network?" given his accomplishments. I have never ever seen a job ad asking for Haskell, and the only time I needed to hire a Haskell dev (with NLP skills), a post to the Haskell mailing list led to zero replies, so we had to re-implement everything in Java. Now I don't think this is a problem of functional programming not being popular, because there are some commercial shops using LISPs around. I would like to read more blog posts about commercial implementations in "minor" languages.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  > a post to the Haskell mailing list led to zero replies There is Haskell Weekly with weekly job offers: As of November 2020, over 4,100 people subscribe to Haskell Weekly. Over the last five issues, the average open rate was 37% and the average click rate was 16%. https://haskellweekly.news/issue/301.html https://haskellweekly.news/issue/301.html https://haskellweekly.news/advertising.html https://haskellweekly.news/advertising.html
  - littlecranky67 5y ago
    Offtopic question: How can you (reliably) meassure open rate of a newsletter? I'd assume mail clients as well as webmailers preventing any sorts of tracking, and tracking only those that have lax privacy requirements would taint the whole metric, wouldn't it?
    - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
      Yes, it does (Haskell Weekly uses Mailchimp): How we calculate open and click rates The open rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered campaigns were opened by subscribers. To find this out, Mailchimp loads a tiny, transparent image into each campaign, and counts how often the image is loaded among the delivered campaigns. The image is invisible to your subscribers. https://mailchimp.com/help/about-open-and-click-rates/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-open-and-click-rates/
moomin 5y ago
“I’m not sure I should admit this”. Way to bury the lede. Seriously mate, good luck. I love Haskell too despite having no professional experience in it.
throwaway4good 5y ago
But the question really should be: Why are no large software development projects done in Haskell? It is a common language in University CS-classes, so it gets a push from that. What is missing from the platform?
- thrown_22 5y ago
  Tooling. It's the same thing that sunk Scala in industry.
- xupybd 5y ago
  It takes a lot to learn to a degree of proficiency. Industry is about solving business problems easily. Hiring a fresh grad to throw together your SAAS business is all too common and they pick and easy to use framework the butcher it into a successful business and terrible mess for future senior devs to clean up.
- xyproto 5y ago
  Some programming languages are more conductive for some types of applications.
- tazjin 5y ago
  There are. But from experience with my customers that use Haskell, they don't go around advertising it much. I hope this guy finds a good Haskell job and doesn't end up in the blockchain world, which is way too prominent in the Haskell ecosystem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lordnacho 5y ago
The interesting thing this brings up is whether programming hiring is too specific. Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers? To me this guy sounds like he could do anything, just see if he's easy to work with and see if he likes your domain. He's certainly said enough about programming over the years that he shouldn't need a leetcode grilling. Anyway my point was it can get quite narrow what we look for in a coder when in fact some broad experience might be just what is necessary. For instance I've coded apps for iPhone and Android despite being ostensibly a back end financial trader. I'd think a lot of coders wouldn't want to be siloed into the first thing they get a job in.
- kragen 5y ago
  He's easy to work with. I was a technical reviewer on his book, and not only was he extremely good at communication, he gracefully handled stupid bullshit from me that nobody could reasonably be expected to handle. In terms of interpersonal ability, I think he's head and shoulders above the crowd.
  - mjd 5y ago
    I have looked back at Kragen's review comments from 2002 and they were (as I remembered) unusually thoughtful, detailed, and helpful. I sent him a more detailed message about this but I wanted to have it on the record here. Kragen: Thanks for your kind words. I am happy to know that you found me easy to work with.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Aw, thanks! I was thinking of the review comments where I was unusually aggressive, detailed, and impatient, and, I should add unreasonably so. I think the fact that to you they only seemed thoughtful, detailed, and helpful speaks volumes about your character.
- mcv 5y ago
  We tend to get hired for what we've done before, rather than for what we want to do in the future. Although it wasn't always like that for me. For a long time I felt it was totally normal to learn a completely new language for a new job. My first job was Visual C++, my second job was Java and XSLT, my third job was Ruby, my fourth was Groovy with some Java and Ruby. Then after some more Java and Ruby, I ended up in Javascript + Angular, then Typescript + Vue, now Typescript + React. I feel like I'm fairly lucky in that I at least still get to hop frameworks; there are tons of people who've been doing Java+Spring for 20 years now. I wouldn't mind moving to Kotlin or Scala, but that's hard to find. At least for me; most recruiters still look at what I did in the past, and they see a lot of Java, so they assume that's what I do.
caaqil 5y ago
> I understand what it means when someone says that a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors. Finally, someone who understands the magic sentence.
vaibhavsagar 5y ago
I hope Mark gets the Haskell job he wants!
xyproto 5y ago
Companies have a need for the application of the tools, not the tools themselves, though. Just like customers don't have the need for a task to be completed with a specific tool (but they might be particular about the process). There's a mismatch in expectations here, from programmers to customers, via companies and hiring processes.
mathieubordere 5y ago
HubSpot is hiring a Haskell developer in Belgium, not sure if the position is remote though. https://www.hubspot.com/careers/jobs/3630647?hubs_signup-cta=careers-apply https://www.hubspot.com/careers/jobs/3630647?hubs_signup-cta... (I'm not affiliated to HubSpot in any way)
intellectronica 5y ago
The Cardano blockchain system is heavily based on Haskel. It is one of the largest ecosystems in this space and is growing rapidly. The author can try to find work with IOHK ( https://iohk.io/ https://iohk.io/ ), the Cardano foundation ( https://cardano.org/ https://cardano.org/ ) or one of several other companies doing commercial or research work around Cardano.
- harryf 5y ago
  There's a good summary of why Cardno uses Haskell here - https://medium.com/@cardano.foundation/why-cardano-chose-haskell-and-why-you-should-care-why-cardano-chose-haskell-and-why-you-should-f97052db2951 https://medium.com/@cardano.foundation/why-cardano-chose-has... - functional programming seems to have been a key influence in how Cardano's approach to smart contracts is built, avoiding centralized state - some insights in that here https://sundaeswap.finance/posts/concurrency-state-cardano https://sundaeswap.finance/posts/concurrency-state-cardano Potentially Cardano could become one of the most significant uses of Haskell in the wild, if it gets traction of course
  - foldr 5y ago
    That blog post makes a big deal out of formal verification. However, my understanding is that if you really want to do formal verification on a practical scale, you are better off using a less fashionable language that's nonetheless had orders of magnitude more investment in verification tooling (such as Java).
ncmncm 5y ago
I, also, would like for Mark Dominus to have a job coding Haskell.
pknerd 5y ago
It'd be interesting to see whether this guy got the job due to this HN post or not.
mebassett 5y ago
Proda, a proptech company in London, has a large team of haskell programmers (local and remote). They make software to help commercial real estate investors get a better handle on their data. www.proda.ai full disclosure: I helped start proda.
ajdegol 5y ago
Cardano. Plutus.
q3k 5y ago
Meanwhile, I left a Haskell job for a Go job. Language isn’t the be-all end-all of a software project. I’ll take a well maintained and well documented Java codebase over a write-only Haskell codebase with more lines of language extension imports than lines of comments. Software developers who only look for jobs always in That One Language freak me out.
- pyrale 5y ago
  > Language isn’t the be-all end-all of a software project. Certainly not, but at some point you make a move to scratch an itch. Sick of doing typeless python with runtime issues everywhere? A typed language may be a good break from that. Annoyed of Haskell in a company where people care more about their exceptions than about the business? Maybe you'll do the opposite move. It's not so much about doing things the one right way as experimenting with what makes you productive and happy. And if people find they're comfortable doing that one thing only, good for them.
- irpapakons 5y ago
  Yep. I wanted a job writing haskell. Got a job writing haskell. It was one of the worst jobs I ever hard (for non-haskell reasons). Team dynamics, culture, how good is a manager, how overengineered is a code base, how easy it is to feel valued and given responsibility. There's so many more important things than the language that now I actively don't care at all. Plus, I think these elitist programming languages attract more jerks so I'd rather avoid anything too niche and go for a Go job or something.
  - rstarast 5y ago
    I'm not that sure about "for non-haskell reasons". Haskell seems to select for people who enjoy going off on puzzling tangents, and it seems like it takes so much learning that for many, meta skills such as good engineering and communication practices fall by the wayside.
- vjust 5y ago
  Agreed on most points there. On the flip side, I was running away from That One Language (Java). I was put off by its verbal diarrhea (when it came to naming classes - blame it on Spring perhaps). And the gratuitous use of OOPs concepts (which I attribute to being a scripter for much of my working life). Perhaps it was more to do with the organization I worked for, it might have been a very (toxic) culture thing that they encouraged - 1) If you didn't know Java you weren't cool. 2) If you didn't know Java you didn't understand OOPs. Lots of companies have such culture issues over languages. Its managers/leadership's job to ensure the tool doesn't become the master, to the detriment of goals. I've been deliberately been a slow-poke when it came to absorbing languages, far from the bleeding edge within the ecosystem I was in. Hasn't hurt at all. Pushing back on trends (once you're 'inside' a language) means you are looking around, and absorbing more of the problem (business domain). If you emerge from an old-job into a new-job, and the only take away is bleeding-edge language/platform features, there's some richness of experience that's been missed IMO, maybe its useful at early career stage, but you need to see the whole picture, not just uber details about a language.
zero_shift 5y ago
I had a job writing Haskell. Then when COVID rolled in we were all put on furlough as the startup had iffy funding. Now I work at a larger company slinging JavaScript. Am I happier? Well, I'd say the technology I work on is a lot less interesting. But I wouldn't trade in stability and benefits for another early age startup, just to write monads again.
runeks 5y ago
I work for Obsidian Systems (https://obsidian.systems/ https://obsidian.systems/) writing Haskell. I believe we're still hiring engineers, and I've pinged the partners with a link to this post.
quickthrower2 5y ago
I have a theory if you want a haskell job you have to compromise heavily on many other aspects of job criteria such as salary, preferred location, interest in the domain etc. Why? Because there are so few of those jobs that it is highly selective and leaves you no selectivity for other aspects. Want $300k + Haskell? You better be someone who wrote GHC! Want $300k without Haskell? Just need US residence, and coding skills and be a bit ruthless. I think a good Haskell job is the on where you build your own micro SaaS using Haskell.
- ghostwriter 5y ago
  > Just need US residence "If you're homeless, just buy a house"
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    It wasn’t a social commentary, just an observation that way many more people are at the intersection of can code and can work in the US, vs have some serious Haskell/FP bragging rights.
- zerr 5y ago
  People who work on GHC are good C/C-- programmers working at Microsoft Research (Cambridge) for 60K GBP :)
  - krsrhe 5y ago
    Do they have side income based on their leadership of GHC?
  - __s 5y ago
    nb spj has left MS Research: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/new-horizons-for-spj/3099 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/new-horizons-for-spj/3099
  - thewarrior 5y ago
    Doesn’t Microsoft research pay top dollar ?
benreesman 5y ago
I would like to hire a serious Haskell hacker. ben@rocinanteresearch.net
- 0des 5y ago
  No landing page, and the qualifiers are "serious" and "hacker". Just based on past experience this feels like an underfunded start-up position. Do something different if you take this project seriously.
  - benreesman 5y ago
    We’re a garage band no doubt. We tend to do contract-to-hire, but we pay up-front, so we assume the risk of there not being a fit. I haven’t done the elite interviewing rounds and been paid all the millions per year in SV in a while, but at least at that time this would have been a much better deal than anyone without a FAANG offer letter could get. We mark to levels.fyi, not Glassdoor.
spark3k 5y ago
Hasura is brilliant and is written in Haskell mostly. Give them a try: https://hasura.io/careers/?jobId=vso4JFIiAd8G https://hasura.io/careers/?jobId=vso4JFIiAd8G
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  What makes them brilliant?
tiko_energy 5y ago
tiko.energy is hiring Haskell developers for roles in Zurich (Switzerland) and Milan (Italy). https://tinyurl.com/3v45m4kd https://tinyurl.com/3v45m4kd (this goes to LinkedIn). We probably would not consider someone as far away as Philadelphia on a permanent basis however, as we expect to operate at least a hybrid model in the future.
analogsalad 5y ago
It looks like the author needs to update their about page: https://blog.plover.com/meta/about-me.html https://blog.plover.com/meta/about-me.html > I may be best known for my book Higher-Order Perl, published in 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann, and for my other work in Perl. But as a programmer I consider myself uncommited to any particular language or system. As with everything else, I try to go for breadth rather than for depth.
- mjd 5y ago
  I don't understand. What part do you think needs to be updated?
  - ColinWright 5y ago
    Not the parent, but I'm guessing that you are here asking for a job in Haskell, but the about says: > ... I consider myself uncommitted to any particular language ... (Also, you mis-spelled "uncommitted")
    - mjd 5y ago
      I still don't understand. Do you? (Thanks for pointing out the typo.)
      - ColinWright 5y ago
        Re typo: You're welcome. Re the other: I think they feel it's contradictory for you to say that you're uncommitted to any particular language while at the same time specifically saying that you'd like a job programming in Haskell. I can see how someone might feel that there's a tension between those two assertions, but I don't see it as contradictory, nor as implying that the "About" needs modification. It was probably just a throw-away comment, and not really worth close analysis. <shrug>
pcaversaccio 5y ago
To build smart contract fuzzers you usually use Haskell. I did my best here: https://twitter.com/pcaversaccio/status/1491014990140407814 https://twitter.com/pcaversaccio/status/1491014990140407814
matijash 5y ago
Wow, this thread really exploded! My 2 cents on Haskell, since we're building https://wasp-lang.dev/ https://wasp-lang.dev/ in it and also just hired several founding engineers: - we're sticking with the "Boring Haskell" manifesto(https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifesto/ https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifest...) - using only the widely adopted compiler plugins and not going too crazy with the monad transformer stack, which keeps the code easy for others to contribute to. - we've hired 2 founding engineers so far - none of them knew Haskell beforehand! But they were both senior engs well versed in different languages and I was surprised with how quickly they picked it up - within the first month they are at 90% productivity.
2ion 5y ago
That's like picking a plumbing job because you get to work with hex instead of torx screws. As a professional solution-provider, you're free to offer only work with a specific set of tools but don't expect jobs to magically appear to accommodate your preference of tools. If you're a plumber, your worth is in the value you create and the tools are a footnote (which you might have to justify anyway). Software engineering is not any different.
- dzogchen 5y ago
  That's like saying a painter should be happy to get a sculpting job, because he is a professional art-provider.
  - cwbrandsma 5y ago
    The other person’s analogy is better, yours sucks. Using the previous analogy, but applying your critique, it would be asking the plumber to become an electrician. Personally I cannot imagine being a programmer and only writing in one language. I currently code in multiple languages, and have forgotten more as well (at least I hope I don’t need PexBasic anymore)
- dack 5y ago
  well, some engineers are lucky enough to get to specify the environment that makes them the happiest, even if it's rare compared to the number of opportunities out there.
- benrbray 5y ago
  I recently had to choose between two job offers, and language was among the most important (although not the only) factors. I ended up choosing the job that lets me write functional Scala, rather than continue writing Python, which has been a major source of frustration in my current job. A better analogy might be a carpenter who chooses to build houses in the traditional nail-free Japanese joinery style, vs the American nails-everywhere style.
kreetx 5y ago
Try Tweag https://boards.greenhouse.io/tweag https://boards.greenhouse.io/tweag (write a cold email if nothing fits in the list).
MaxGabriel 5y ago
Mercury is hiring ~50 developers to write Haskell this year. Our entire backend is in Haskell, and powers banking for many startups and e-commerce companies Try it out at demo.mercury.com Jobs page: mercury.com/jobs To the OP: I asked our team to reach out to you
agentultra 5y ago
Work at Mercury [0]. They train folks who haven’t used Haskell before. [0] https://mercury.com/jobs https://mercury.com/jobs
y04nn 5y ago
I really want to like Haskell, there is great programs that I use and love in Haskell (pandoc, glirc, hoogle, hackage), but the ecosystem (cabal, stack, ghc) really drag you down, with libraries incompatibilities, slow upstream updates, too many language extensions and custom operators to decode the code you didn't write. But usually there is great documentation to compensate and usually good error reports from ghc. Haskell is nice to write little programs with few dependencies to avoid incompatibilities. I personalty used, and continue to use it to write a small monolithic blogging platform with too many dependencies. It works really well, is efficient, and the code is really easy to update, even after not looking at the code for few month. But if I would do it again, and for a production system, I would split my code into multiple micro-services.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  I suggest not throwing out the baby (the monolith) with the bathwater (dependency hell). Some languages are better than others at managing dependencies. You might like Rust in this regard; it has no global namespace, so IIUC, that minimizes dependency conflicts.
rundmc 5y ago
Tontine Trust is making the global pensions industry Functional with a new OECD endorsed design described by a Nobel Prize Winning Economist as "a pension system for the world that can never go bankrupt". See: https://tontine.com https://tontine.com We always have room for more Haskeller mathematicians with solid experience.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I was once in the position of Mark Dominus. I had spent years of using Haskell for recreational programming and wrote a book using the subset of Haskell that I personally use (you can get a free copy at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson by setting the price to free). About six years ago I decided to apply for Haskell jobs at Standard Charter and Facebook on Haskell teams with well known people in the field. Both groups said that I was an interesting candidate and suggested getting another Haskell job for a while, and then reapplying. I did end up consulting remotely for a startup in India writing Haskell but that job was short (about 6 weeks) because I was in the process of getting hired at Capital One to manage a deep learning team.
Pompidou 5y ago
main = putStrLn "job"
tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
Chaos Group does some cool work in Haskell: https://www.chaos.com/all-products https://www.chaos.com/all-products
mwcampbell 5y ago
Looking for a job in a particular programming language, without saying anything about the problem domain, seems weird to me. But I suppose I'm unusual in that I've found a problem domain (accessibility) that I deeply care about, and will cross languages and platforms to work on projects in that domain.
karanbhangui 5y ago
Check out mercury bank and hasura
fortran77 5y ago
He can do what most Haskell folks do; write Haskell for fun, but earn a living delivering pizzas or making coffee.
tasha0663 5y ago
I've been reading this blog on and off for years. In case you're reading on a screen orientation that causes the sidebar and "About Me" link to vanish, the writer is Mark Jason Dominus, author of Higher Order Perl.
vcryan 5y ago
This dude should apply for some jobs. As a hiring manager, I don't spend much time searching for blog posts about someone being interested in a new job. The part about resignation without having a new job may be totally fine, but I'd be curious to understand the circumstances. A person that confuses a job application with a blog post might get confused about other aspects of work responsibilities.
- dack 5y ago
  they have a following on their blog, so rather than cold-apply to various (possibly terrible) companies and get thrashed around by their recruiters, they figure someone may be able to give them a high-quality lead and a foot in the door. Seems 100% reasonable to me. > A person that confuses a job application with a blog post might get confused about other aspects of work responsibilities. Are you serious about this? It seems like an extreme over-generalization and very unlikely to be true at all.
darksaints 5y ago
Without saying anything about this particular person, I've found an interesting pattern with people who seek out a specific programming language to work in: their actual code tends to suck pretty bad. People that obsess over any particular language will typically obsess over it because they learned some new abstraction trick and seem to think that everything should be rewritten in it. And so instead of focusing on the problem they have to solve, they become obsessed with rewriting code that already has solved problems...and they tend to do it in a way that is short and succinct but utterly opaque and black-boxish. No thanks. Again, I'm not expecting that everybody who does this is like this, but I've seen it enough that it is a pretty strong negative warning signal.
- kradroy 5y ago
  I have experienced this as well. Perhaps coincidentally the type of language they're always obsessed with is a functional one. I've yet to see a dev who's rabid over mutable state. They're usually bonzo for free monads. That being said, I've generally found people who are obsessed over a single "technological thing" at work (language type, language, framework, OOP dev principles) rarely produce anything of value. They're usually on a mission to prove themselves right at any cost. Flexibility and ingenuity are the keys to a productive dev career.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    "They're usually on a mission to prove themselves right at any cost." Exactly. That being said I wish there were more devs obsessed with mutable state. Some problems are inherently mutable, and trying to make them immutable doesn't actually get rid of the state, it just pushes it around awkwardly. Classes, for as much hate as they get (mostly deserved IMO), are a godsend for those types of problems. And while they're helpful, stateful programming is still extremely hard. I really wish there was more innovation in this area.
    - Tainnor 5y ago
      You can work with mutable state in Haskell, you just have to be explicit about it (e.g. State monad).
bandrami 5y ago
I would like a job painting things green. It's kind of a category error.
betimsl 5y ago
I would like a job writing Clojure and/or Elm.
dtornabene 5y ago
Pretty wild to read so many comments about "programmers and their one true language write terrible code anyway/or are weird" when the person being commented on wrote one of the best perl books there is (and one of the best programming books period) and made a point of saying "I've never written it professionally". The entire blog post is about him attempting to make a transition! Those aren't the "one true language" people.
ironman1478 5y ago
I find it to be a really odd when people want to work with specific languages. Languages are just a means to an end, not an end themselves. When I've made career changes it's because I wanted to solve certain problems or learn about specific layers of the stack (embedded and HW). I don't care what language is optimal in a domain. If I don't know it I'll learn it, but a language isn't gonna solve the domain specific issues. It's just a tool.
- eweise 5y ago
  I don't find it odd. Its actually kind of frustrating using tools that make your job harder. Everything else being equal, I would choose a job where I coded in Kotlin over Java since I get frustrated easily with Java.
- tmoertel 5y ago
  In this case, I suspect that Mark is interested in the distribution of jobs associated with Haskell as much as in the language itself. Haskell shops tend to solve certain kinds of problems and have certain philosophies about software. If you're interested in these problems and philosophies, a good way to find a job aligned with your interests is to find a job writing Haskell.
- SonOfLilit 5y ago
  Haskell is the only language I ever learned (out of dozens, including Lisp and Forth) that felt like learning something completely new, like none of my existing programming knowledge applied. Working in Haskell means exploring a very different neighborhood in design-space. It's much more of a change of pace than learning about a specific layer of the stack.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    For me Haskell and Prolog were both like that.
- smasher164 5y ago
  Languages are means to end, where the end you reach is significantly affected by the means you used to get there. - Using Haskell means you can model your domain more precisely and have higher correctness guarantees. - Using Rust means you get memory safety while maintaining the speed of C++, where the vast majority of vulnerabilities are memory safety issues. - Using SQL means you can apply an optimizer on top of what is essentially relational algebra over tables. In all of these cases, a less effective tool could be used, yes. But "it's just a tool" doesn't capture the fact that tools do solve domain-specific issues, and OP is not wrong to seek an employer who acknowledges the value of Haskell has to add.
EGreg 5y ago
The guy should just join Plutus Pioneers program and become one of the first certified Cardano developers. Can't those guys charge like $1000 an hour? LOL
m1117 5y ago
Philly is the best. Everyone should come to Philly!
jpindar 5y ago
I would like a job writing any language.
- throwaway889900 5y ago
  I suppose "author" is out of the question.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hs211216 5y ago
I'm in a similar situation to Mark. I left my previous company at the end of 2021. I needed to take a break so I decided to take some time to learn Haskell better and study open source Haskell projects before starting my next job search. For what it's worth here's a list of Haskell hiring-related things I've come across. https://gist.github.com/hs211216/7e734535eadc869df26562b33db8249d https://gist.github.com/hs211216/7e734535eadc869df26562b33db...
mboes 5y ago
Tweag hired 50+ developers in 2021. We're aiming to hire 50+ developers in 2022. https://tweag.io/careers https://tweag.io/careers.
drstrangevibes 5y ago
beamatronic 5y ago
I would like a job using Motif to create GUI apps for UNIX workstations using plain C. edit: messed up some words
swamp40 5y ago
Cardano uses Haskell and Cardano smart contracts are exploding right now. Startups everywhere, or start your own.
lloydatkinson 5y ago
Honestly I'd just like a job writing code that actually benefits people or is even seen by the light of day. That isn't killed off by layers of mismanagement, "agile methodology", moving goal posts.
2143 5y ago
I don't know if OP is going to see this. I feel he'll be happy at Jane Street Capital. They use OCaml though (and I think they have a large part in building OCaml), but I suppose an expert Haskeller would have no trouble at all picking up OCaml if they want to. I don't know if they have remote work possibilities though.
joostd 5y ago
Not sure if this is still relevant today, but I registered as a Haskell developer at https://www.haskellers.com/ https://www.haskellers.com/ decades ago and for a while, I received a number of offers from companies searching for Haskell developers, primarily from fintech. Not any recent ones though. Also not sure if that’s because that site has grown old or because I have.
phendrenad2 5y ago
This is ridiculous. Of course there are no "haskell jobs". Nobody knows haskell. Looking for haskell programmers is like looking for a four-leaf clover. Actually it's more pointless because a four-leaf clover makes a nice instagram story. So if haskell is so great, why don't you teach a few of your friends to program in it, and increase the number of haskell programmers available? The only reason there are "python jobs" is because django exists. The only reason there are "ruby jobs" is because rails exists. The only reason there are "javascript jobs" is because browsers exist. The only reason there are "C++ jobs" is because algorithmic trading and video games exist. The only reason there are "scala jobs" is because the JVM exists (and concurrency is hard). What real-world problem does haskell solve that python does not, or what "killer framework" is implemented in haskell? Why not make it and prove that haskell is worth learning? All of that said, if you really want to program in haskell at a job, find a company that is all-in on microservices. They may allow you to write small services in haskell, as long as they know that if you leave the company, and they can't find one of the friends you taught a haskell for great good, they can find a java dev to rewrite it.

405 points by Rerarom 5y ago

ggm 5y ago

Any blog with Robertson Davies deserves promotion. My favourite Canadian author. And I certainly hope he finds haskell work, burrito or not.

mjd 5y ago
Davies has showed up on my blog a few times. It's possible you will enjoy these miscellaneous notes on _The Manticore_: https://blog.plover.com/book/Manticore.html https://blog.plover.com/book/Manticore.html
- ggm 5y ago
  Interesting. Nice notes, thanks! I liked "Leven of malice" and found myself thinking of it again recently reading "the shipping news": -the resonances of small (and not so small) town newspaper publishing in the two. And Proulx writes of similarly broken people. "A mixture of frailties" is a great read for anyone who has uprooted themselves for serious study or work, and suffers culture shock. My mum was an art historian and studied under Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld Institute so you can understand how "Cornish" read to me. If you haven't read "Possession" by AS Byatt, I think having enjoyed "Cornish" you would like it. A very different book but touching many similar concepts without the magical realism perhaps. (Academic rivalries, art history) I often think of the "putting yourself on trial" rap from "the Manticore" -my own star chamber isn't always as even handed.

xupybd 5y ago

That doesn't bode well for the rest of us if someone this accomplished can't land a Haskell job. This makes me wonder if it's been worth learning functional programming. I've put hours and hours of my free time into F#. I'm not sure that it was a wise move. That said I love F#.

SonOfLilit 5y ago
Author doesn't say he has trouble finding a Haskell job. If I had a Haskell blog that regularly reaches the HN front page, I'd write a "looking for a job" post there as the first thing in my search, not after exhausting all other avenues.
IshKebab 5y ago
All he's done is write a blog post yesterday saying "does anyone want to give me a Haskell job? I have no substantial experience in Haskell". Bit early to say he can't land a Haskell job.
- xupybd 5y ago
  This is a very fair point.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Is it because they might be overqualified, so any company that happens to do haskell (which I can imagine aren't many) are intimidated? I mean how many people here, currently working in language X, would want to hire someone that is better than they are? I mean rationally it makes sense - bette for the company, learning opportunities, etc, but emotionally it would seriously piss me off if someone came swooping in and basically made me obsolete and look stupid. (I'm not saying the author of the article would do so, I'm just speaking in general and thinking up hypothetical scenarios)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dagw 5y ago
  but emotionally it would seriously piss me off That is why choices like that should be left to project managers. As someone who is coding less and managing more these days, I have none of that ego left. If I could hire someone twice as good as me I would do so in a heart beat[1] and then go home and celebrate my great luck. [1] Assuming they aren't an asshole etc. etc.

e19293001 5y ago

Hey, he is the author of Higher-Order Perl!

iqanq 5y ago

I would like a job watching mexican soap operas.

pkdpic 5y ago
Too bad all those jobs got automated.
kozak 5y ago
I bet such a job exists somewhere, because someone has to watch each episode of the soap opera as a QA check before it gets aired.
- WJW 5y ago
  My wife used to work as a translator for Netflix for a while; all the episodes get cut up in chunks of a few minutes that get doled out to different translators/QA people so that the plot does not leak out.
  - azemetre 5y ago
    Wouldn't that potentially hurt the translations? Without getting the full context of the scene or plot you potentially misread some scenes.
fortran77 5y ago
In Haskell?

actuator 5y ago

As far as I know, Facebook has possibly the biggest Haskell deployment in form of one of their anti abuse tool.

theK 5y ago
There is also the Cardano ecosystem which is mainly built on Haskell and runs one of the biggest and most active blockchains ever.
- mythrwy 5y ago
  They also have a consistent history of wildly missing delivery dates though.
- captaincaveman 5y ago
  Hmm and there is a lot of discussion about it being a barrier to adoption. I think it is a good tech choice to be honest, I want my blockchain carefully built and audited.
kbumsik 5y ago
You mean, Haxl? [1] But AFAIK only a few devs are involved for the development. [1] https://github.com/facebook/Haxl https://github.com/facebook/Haxl
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  No, their SPAM filter is (yes, still) in Haskell. https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...
  - arianvanp 5y ago
    (For context: the spam filter uses the Haxl library. Yes Haxl itself has few developers; but it has many users)
- 5y ago

ramboldio 5y ago

https://wire.com/en/ https://wire.com/en/

makerofthings 5y ago

I would love a job writing Haskell but any of the jobs I’ve seen would involve a 6 figure pay cut. Haskell is such a joy to work with.

deepsun 5y ago
That's sad, but fair. You pay for the joy. In other words, demand is weaker than supply, compared to other jobs, like COBOL.

haskellisameme 5y ago

throwaway4good 5y ago

In Denmark wildcat banker Lars Seier's crypto startup explicitly hires Haskell-developers: https://www.concordium.com/careers https://www.concordium.com/careers

jll29 5y ago

It's a good idea to try to find a job this way, but given that he has been part of the Haskell community for a long time one might ask "Why can't he find a job using his network?" given his accomplishments. I have never ever seen a job ad asking for Haskell, and the only time I needed to hire a Haskell dev (with NLP skills), a post to the Haskell mailing list led to zero replies, so we had to re-implement everything in Java. Now I don't think this is a problem of functional programming not being popular, because there are some commercial shops using LISPs around. I would like to read more blog posts about commercial implementations in "minor" languages.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> a post to the Haskell mailing list led to zero replies There is Haskell Weekly with weekly job offers: As of November 2020, over 4,100 people subscribe to Haskell Weekly. Over the last five issues, the average open rate was 37% and the average click rate was 16%. https://haskellweekly.news/issue/301.html https://haskellweekly.news/issue/301.html https://haskellweekly.news/advertising.html https://haskellweekly.news/advertising.html
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  Offtopic question: How can you (reliably) meassure open rate of a newsletter? I'd assume mail clients as well as webmailers preventing any sorts of tracking, and tracking only those that have lax privacy requirements would taint the whole metric, wouldn't it?
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    Yes, it does (Haskell Weekly uses Mailchimp): How we calculate open and click rates The open rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered campaigns were opened by subscribers. To find this out, Mailchimp loads a tiny, transparent image into each campaign, and counts how often the image is loaded among the delivered campaigns. The image is invisible to your subscribers. https://mailchimp.com/help/about-open-and-click-rates/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-open-and-click-rates/

moomin 5y ago

“I’m not sure I should admit this”. Way to bury the lede. Seriously mate, good luck. I love Haskell too despite having no professional experience in it.

throwaway4good 5y ago

But the question really should be: Why are no large software development projects done in Haskell? It is a common language in University CS-classes, so it gets a push from that. What is missing from the platform?

thrown_22 5y ago
Tooling. It's the same thing that sunk Scala in industry.
xupybd 5y ago
It takes a lot to learn to a degree of proficiency. Industry is about solving business problems easily. Hiring a fresh grad to throw together your SAAS business is all too common and they pick and easy to use framework the butcher it into a successful business and terrible mess for future senior devs to clean up.
xyproto 5y ago
Some programming languages are more conductive for some types of applications.
tazjin 5y ago
There are. But from experience with my customers that use Haskell, they don't go around advertising it much. I hope this guy finds a good Haskell job and doesn't end up in the blockchain world, which is way too prominent in the Haskell ecosystem.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lordnacho 5y ago

The interesting thing this brings up is whether programming hiring is too specific. Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers? To me this guy sounds like he could do anything, just see if he's easy to work with and see if he likes your domain. He's certainly said enough about programming over the years that he shouldn't need a leetcode grilling. Anyway my point was it can get quite narrow what we look for in a coder when in fact some broad experience might be just what is necessary. For instance I've coded apps for iPhone and Android despite being ostensibly a back end financial trader. I'd think a lot of coders wouldn't want to be siloed into the first thing they get a job in.

kragen 5y ago
He's easy to work with. I was a technical reviewer on his book, and not only was he extremely good at communication, he gracefully handled stupid bullshit from me that nobody could reasonably be expected to handle. In terms of interpersonal ability, I think he's head and shoulders above the crowd.
- mjd 5y ago
  I have looked back at Kragen's review comments from 2002 and they were (as I remembered) unusually thoughtful, detailed, and helpful. I sent him a more detailed message about this but I wanted to have it on the record here. Kragen: Thanks for your kind words. I am happy to know that you found me easy to work with.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Aw, thanks! I was thinking of the review comments where I was unusually aggressive, detailed, and impatient, and, I should add unreasonably so. I think the fact that to you they only seemed thoughtful, detailed, and helpful speaks volumes about your character.
mcv 5y ago
We tend to get hired for what we've done before, rather than for what we want to do in the future. Although it wasn't always like that for me. For a long time I felt it was totally normal to learn a completely new language for a new job. My first job was Visual C++, my second job was Java and XSLT, my third job was Ruby, my fourth was Groovy with some Java and Ruby. Then after some more Java and Ruby, I ended up in Javascript + Angular, then Typescript + Vue, now Typescript + React. I feel like I'm fairly lucky in that I at least still get to hop frameworks; there are tons of people who've been doing Java+Spring for 20 years now. I wouldn't mind moving to Kotlin or Scala, but that's hard to find. At least for me; most recruiters still look at what I did in the past, and they see a lot of Java, so they assume that's what I do.

caaqil 5y ago

> I understand what it means when someone says that a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors. Finally, someone who understands the magic sentence.

vaibhavsagar 5y ago

I hope Mark gets the Haskell job he wants!

xyproto 5y ago

Companies have a need for the application of the tools, not the tools themselves, though. Just like customers don't have the need for a task to be completed with a specific tool (but they might be particular about the process). There's a mismatch in expectations here, from programmers to customers, via companies and hiring processes.

mathieubordere 5y ago

HubSpot is hiring a Haskell developer in Belgium, not sure if the position is remote though. https://www.hubspot.com/careers/jobs/3630647?hubs_signup-cta=careers-apply https://www.hubspot.com/careers/jobs/3630647?hubs_signup-cta... (I'm not affiliated to HubSpot in any way)

intellectronica 5y ago

The Cardano blockchain system is heavily based on Haskel. It is one of the largest ecosystems in this space and is growing rapidly. The author can try to find work with IOHK ( https://iohk.io/ https://iohk.io/ ), the Cardano foundation ( https://cardano.org/ https://cardano.org/ ) or one of several other companies doing commercial or research work around Cardano.

harryf 5y ago
There's a good summary of why Cardno uses Haskell here - https://medium.com/@cardano.foundation/why-cardano-chose-haskell-and-why-you-should-care-why-cardano-chose-haskell-and-why-you-should-f97052db2951 https://medium.com/@cardano.foundation/why-cardano-chose-has... - functional programming seems to have been a key influence in how Cardano's approach to smart contracts is built, avoiding centralized state - some insights in that here https://sundaeswap.finance/posts/concurrency-state-cardano https://sundaeswap.finance/posts/concurrency-state-cardano Potentially Cardano could become one of the most significant uses of Haskell in the wild, if it gets traction of course
- foldr 5y ago
  That blog post makes a big deal out of formal verification. However, my understanding is that if you really want to do formal verification on a practical scale, you are better off using a less fashionable language that's nonetheless had orders of magnitude more investment in verification tooling (such as Java).

ncmncm 5y ago

I, also, would like for Mark Dominus to have a job coding Haskell.

pknerd 5y ago

It'd be interesting to see whether this guy got the job due to this HN post or not.

mebassett 5y ago

Proda, a proptech company in London, has a large team of haskell programmers (local and remote). They make software to help commercial real estate investors get a better handle on their data. www.proda.ai full disclosure: I helped start proda.

ajdegol 5y ago

Cardano. Plutus.

q3k 5y ago

Meanwhile, I left a Haskell job for a Go job. Language isn’t the be-all end-all of a software project. I’ll take a well maintained and well documented Java codebase over a write-only Haskell codebase with more lines of language extension imports than lines of comments. Software developers who only look for jobs always in That One Language freak me out.

pyrale 5y ago
> Language isn’t the be-all end-all of a software project. Certainly not, but at some point you make a move to scratch an itch. Sick of doing typeless python with runtime issues everywhere? A typed language may be a good break from that. Annoyed of Haskell in a company where people care more about their exceptions than about the business? Maybe you'll do the opposite move. It's not so much about doing things the one right way as experimenting with what makes you productive and happy. And if people find they're comfortable doing that one thing only, good for them.
irpapakons 5y ago
Yep. I wanted a job writing haskell. Got a job writing haskell. It was one of the worst jobs I ever hard (for non-haskell reasons). Team dynamics, culture, how good is a manager, how overengineered is a code base, how easy it is to feel valued and given responsibility. There's so many more important things than the language that now I actively don't care at all. Plus, I think these elitist programming languages attract more jerks so I'd rather avoid anything too niche and go for a Go job or something.
- rstarast 5y ago
  I'm not that sure about "for non-haskell reasons". Haskell seems to select for people who enjoy going off on puzzling tangents, and it seems like it takes so much learning that for many, meta skills such as good engineering and communication practices fall by the wayside.
vjust 5y ago
Agreed on most points there. On the flip side, I was running away from That One Language (Java). I was put off by its verbal diarrhea (when it came to naming classes - blame it on Spring perhaps). And the gratuitous use of OOPs concepts (which I attribute to being a scripter for much of my working life). Perhaps it was more to do with the organization I worked for, it might have been a very (toxic) culture thing that they encouraged - 1) If you didn't know Java you weren't cool. 2) If you didn't know Java you didn't understand OOPs. Lots of companies have such culture issues over languages. Its managers/leadership's job to ensure the tool doesn't become the master, to the detriment of goals. I've been deliberately been a slow-poke when it came to absorbing languages, far from the bleeding edge within the ecosystem I was in. Hasn't hurt at all. Pushing back on trends (once you're 'inside' a language) means you are looking around, and absorbing more of the problem (business domain). If you emerge from an old-job into a new-job, and the only take away is bleeding-edge language/platform features, there's some richness of experience that's been missed IMO, maybe its useful at early career stage, but you need to see the whole picture, not just uber details about a language.

zero_shift 5y ago

I had a job writing Haskell. Then when COVID rolled in we were all put on furlough as the startup had iffy funding. Now I work at a larger company slinging JavaScript. Am I happier? Well, I'd say the technology I work on is a lot less interesting. But I wouldn't trade in stability and benefits for another early age startup, just to write monads again.

runeks 5y ago

I work for Obsidian Systems (https://obsidian.systems/ https://obsidian.systems/) writing Haskell. I believe we're still hiring engineers, and I've pinged the partners with a link to this post.

quickthrower2 5y ago

I have a theory if you want a haskell job you have to compromise heavily on many other aspects of job criteria such as salary, preferred location, interest in the domain etc. Why? Because there are so few of those jobs that it is highly selective and leaves you no selectivity for other aspects. Want $300k + Haskell? You better be someone who wrote GHC! Want $300k without Haskell? Just need US residence, and coding skills and be a bit ruthless. I think a good Haskell job is the on where you build your own micro SaaS using Haskell.

ghostwriter 5y ago
> Just need US residence "If you're homeless, just buy a house"
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  It wasn’t a social commentary, just an observation that way many more people are at the intersection of can code and can work in the US, vs have some serious Haskell/FP bragging rights.
zerr 5y ago
People who work on GHC are good C/C-- programmers working at Microsoft Research (Cambridge) for 60K GBP :)
- krsrhe 5y ago
  Do they have side income based on their leadership of GHC?
- __s 5y ago
  nb spj has left MS Research: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/new-horizons-for-spj/3099 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/new-horizons-for-spj/3099
- thewarrior 5y ago
  Doesn’t Microsoft research pay top dollar ?

benreesman 5y ago

I would like to hire a serious Haskell hacker. ben@rocinanteresearch.net

0des 5y ago
No landing page, and the qualifiers are "serious" and "hacker". Just based on past experience this feels like an underfunded start-up position. Do something different if you take this project seriously.
- benreesman 5y ago
  We’re a garage band no doubt. We tend to do contract-to-hire, but we pay up-front, so we assume the risk of there not being a fit. I haven’t done the elite interviewing rounds and been paid all the millions per year in SV in a while, but at least at that time this would have been a much better deal than anyone without a FAANG offer letter could get. We mark to levels.fyi, not Glassdoor.

spark3k 5y ago

Hasura is brilliant and is written in Haskell mostly. Give them a try: https://hasura.io/careers/?jobId=vso4JFIiAd8G https://hasura.io/careers/?jobId=vso4JFIiAd8G

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
What makes them brilliant?

tiko_energy 5y ago

tiko.energy is hiring Haskell developers for roles in Zurich (Switzerland) and Milan (Italy). https://tinyurl.com/3v45m4kd https://tinyurl.com/3v45m4kd (this goes to LinkedIn). We probably would not consider someone as far away as Philadelphia on a permanent basis however, as we expect to operate at least a hybrid model in the future.

analogsalad 5y ago

It looks like the author needs to update their about page: https://blog.plover.com/meta/about-me.html https://blog.plover.com/meta/about-me.html > I may be best known for my book Higher-Order Perl, published in 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann, and for my other work in Perl. But as a programmer I consider myself uncommited to any particular language or system. As with everything else, I try to go for breadth rather than for depth.

mjd 5y ago
I don't understand. What part do you think needs to be updated?
- ColinWright 5y ago
  Not the parent, but I'm guessing that you are here asking for a job in Haskell, but the about says: > ... I consider myself uncommitted to any particular language ... (Also, you mis-spelled "uncommitted")
  - mjd 5y ago
    I still don't understand. Do you? (Thanks for pointing out the typo.)
    - ColinWright 5y ago
      Re typo: You're welcome. Re the other: I think they feel it's contradictory for you to say that you're uncommitted to any particular language while at the same time specifically saying that you'd like a job programming in Haskell. I can see how someone might feel that there's a tension between those two assertions, but I don't see it as contradictory, nor as implying that the "About" needs modification. It was probably just a throw-away comment, and not really worth close analysis. <shrug>

pcaversaccio 5y ago

To build smart contract fuzzers you usually use Haskell. I did my best here: https://twitter.com/pcaversaccio/status/1491014990140407814 https://twitter.com/pcaversaccio/status/1491014990140407814

matijash 5y ago

Wow, this thread really exploded! My 2 cents on Haskell, since we're building https://wasp-lang.dev/ https://wasp-lang.dev/ in it and also just hired several founding engineers: - we're sticking with the "Boring Haskell" manifesto(https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifesto/ https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifest...) - using only the widely adopted compiler plugins and not going too crazy with the monad transformer stack, which keeps the code easy for others to contribute to. - we've hired 2 founding engineers so far - none of them knew Haskell beforehand! But they were both senior engs well versed in different languages and I was surprised with how quickly they picked it up - within the first month they are at 90% productivity.

2ion 5y ago

That's like picking a plumbing job because you get to work with hex instead of torx screws. As a professional solution-provider, you're free to offer only work with a specific set of tools but don't expect jobs to magically appear to accommodate your preference of tools. If you're a plumber, your worth is in the value you create and the tools are a footnote (which you might have to justify anyway). Software engineering is not any different.

dzogchen 5y ago
That's like saying a painter should be happy to get a sculpting job, because he is a professional art-provider.
- cwbrandsma 5y ago
  The other person’s analogy is better, yours sucks. Using the previous analogy, but applying your critique, it would be asking the plumber to become an electrician. Personally I cannot imagine being a programmer and only writing in one language. I currently code in multiple languages, and have forgotten more as well (at least I hope I don’t need PexBasic anymore)
dack 5y ago
well, some engineers are lucky enough to get to specify the environment that makes them the happiest, even if it's rare compared to the number of opportunities out there.
benrbray 5y ago
I recently had to choose between two job offers, and language was among the most important (although not the only) factors. I ended up choosing the job that lets me write functional Scala, rather than continue writing Python, which has been a major source of frustration in my current job. A better analogy might be a carpenter who chooses to build houses in the traditional nail-free Japanese joinery style, vs the American nails-everywhere style.

kreetx 5y ago

Try Tweag https://boards.greenhouse.io/tweag https://boards.greenhouse.io/tweag (write a cold email if nothing fits in the list).

MaxGabriel 5y ago

Mercury is hiring ~50 developers to write Haskell this year. Our entire backend is in Haskell, and powers banking for many startups and e-commerce companies Try it out at demo.mercury.com Jobs page: mercury.com/jobs To the OP: I asked our team to reach out to you

agentultra 5y ago

Work at Mercury [0]. They train folks who haven’t used Haskell before. [0] https://mercury.com/jobs https://mercury.com/jobs

y04nn 5y ago

I really want to like Haskell, there is great programs that I use and love in Haskell (pandoc, glirc, hoogle, hackage), but the ecosystem (cabal, stack, ghc) really drag you down, with libraries incompatibilities, slow upstream updates, too many language extensions and custom operators to decode the code you didn't write. But usually there is great documentation to compensate and usually good error reports from ghc. Haskell is nice to write little programs with few dependencies to avoid incompatibilities. I personalty used, and continue to use it to write a small monolithic blogging platform with too many dependencies. It works really well, is efficient, and the code is really easy to update, even after not looking at the code for few month. But if I would do it again, and for a production system, I would split my code into multiple micro-services.

mwcampbell 5y ago
I suggest not throwing out the baby (the monolith) with the bathwater (dependency hell). Some languages are better than others at managing dependencies. You might like Rust in this regard; it has no global namespace, so IIUC, that minimizes dependency conflicts.

rundmc 5y ago

Tontine Trust is making the global pensions industry Functional with a new OECD endorsed design described by a Nobel Prize Winning Economist as "a pension system for the world that can never go bankrupt". See: https://tontine.com https://tontine.com We always have room for more Haskeller mathematicians with solid experience.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I was once in the position of Mark Dominus. I had spent years of using Haskell for recreational programming and wrote a book using the subset of Haskell that I personally use (you can get a free copy at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson by setting the price to free). About six years ago I decided to apply for Haskell jobs at Standard Charter and Facebook on Haskell teams with well known people in the field. Both groups said that I was an interesting candidate and suggested getting another Haskell job for a while, and then reapplying. I did end up consulting remotely for a startup in India writing Haskell but that job was short (about 6 weeks) because I was in the process of getting hired at Capital One to manage a deep learning team.

Pompidou 5y ago

main = putStrLn "job"

tdsamardzhiev 5y ago

Chaos Group does some cool work in Haskell: https://www.chaos.com/all-products https://www.chaos.com/all-products

mwcampbell 5y ago

Looking for a job in a particular programming language, without saying anything about the problem domain, seems weird to me. But I suppose I'm unusual in that I've found a problem domain (accessibility) that I deeply care about, and will cross languages and platforms to work on projects in that domain.

karanbhangui 5y ago

Check out mercury bank and hasura

fortran77 5y ago

He can do what most Haskell folks do; write Haskell for fun, but earn a living delivering pizzas or making coffee.

tasha0663 5y ago

I've been reading this blog on and off for years. In case you're reading on a screen orientation that causes the sidebar and "About Me" link to vanish, the writer is Mark Jason Dominus, author of Higher Order Perl.

vcryan 5y ago

This dude should apply for some jobs. As a hiring manager, I don't spend much time searching for blog posts about someone being interested in a new job. The part about resignation without having a new job may be totally fine, but I'd be curious to understand the circumstances. A person that confuses a job application with a blog post might get confused about other aspects of work responsibilities.

dack 5y ago
they have a following on their blog, so rather than cold-apply to various (possibly terrible) companies and get thrashed around by their recruiters, they figure someone may be able to give them a high-quality lead and a foot in the door. Seems 100% reasonable to me. > A person that confuses a job application with a blog post might get confused about other aspects of work responsibilities. Are you serious about this? It seems like an extreme over-generalization and very unlikely to be true at all.

darksaints 5y ago

Without saying anything about this particular person, I've found an interesting pattern with people who seek out a specific programming language to work in: their actual code tends to suck pretty bad. People that obsess over any particular language will typically obsess over it because they learned some new abstraction trick and seem to think that everything should be rewritten in it. And so instead of focusing on the problem they have to solve, they become obsessed with rewriting code that already has solved problems...and they tend to do it in a way that is short and succinct but utterly opaque and black-boxish. No thanks. Again, I'm not expecting that everybody who does this is like this, but I've seen it enough that it is a pretty strong negative warning signal.

kradroy 5y ago
I have experienced this as well. Perhaps coincidentally the type of language they're always obsessed with is a functional one. I've yet to see a dev who's rabid over mutable state. They're usually bonzo for free monads. That being said, I've generally found people who are obsessed over a single "technological thing" at work (language type, language, framework, OOP dev principles) rarely produce anything of value. They're usually on a mission to prove themselves right at any cost. Flexibility and ingenuity are the keys to a productive dev career.
- darksaints 5y ago
  "They're usually on a mission to prove themselves right at any cost." Exactly. That being said I wish there were more devs obsessed with mutable state. Some problems are inherently mutable, and trying to make them immutable doesn't actually get rid of the state, it just pushes it around awkwardly. Classes, for as much hate as they get (mostly deserved IMO), are a godsend for those types of problems. And while they're helpful, stateful programming is still extremely hard. I really wish there was more innovation in this area.
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    You can work with mutable state in Haskell, you just have to be explicit about it (e.g. State monad).

bandrami 5y ago

I would like a job painting things green. It's kind of a category error.

betimsl 5y ago

I would like a job writing Clojure and/or Elm.

dtornabene 5y ago

Pretty wild to read so many comments about "programmers and their one true language write terrible code anyway/or are weird" when the person being commented on wrote one of the best perl books there is (and one of the best programming books period) and made a point of saying "I've never written it professionally". The entire blog post is about him attempting to make a transition! Those aren't the "one true language" people.

ironman1478 5y ago

I find it to be a really odd when people want to work with specific languages. Languages are just a means to an end, not an end themselves. When I've made career changes it's because I wanted to solve certain problems or learn about specific layers of the stack (embedded and HW). I don't care what language is optimal in a domain. If I don't know it I'll learn it, but a language isn't gonna solve the domain specific issues. It's just a tool.

eweise 5y ago
I don't find it odd. Its actually kind of frustrating using tools that make your job harder. Everything else being equal, I would choose a job where I coded in Kotlin over Java since I get frustrated easily with Java.
tmoertel 5y ago
In this case, I suspect that Mark is interested in the distribution of jobs associated with Haskell as much as in the language itself. Haskell shops tend to solve certain kinds of problems and have certain philosophies about software. If you're interested in these problems and philosophies, a good way to find a job aligned with your interests is to find a job writing Haskell.
SonOfLilit 5y ago
Haskell is the only language I ever learned (out of dozens, including Lisp and Forth) that felt like learning something completely new, like none of my existing programming knowledge applied. Working in Haskell means exploring a very different neighborhood in design-space. It's much more of a change of pace than learning about a specific layer of the stack.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  For me Haskell and Prolog were both like that.
smasher164 5y ago
Languages are means to end, where the end you reach is significantly affected by the means you used to get there. - Using Haskell means you can model your domain more precisely and have higher correctness guarantees. - Using Rust means you get memory safety while maintaining the speed of C++, where the vast majority of vulnerabilities are memory safety issues. - Using SQL means you can apply an optimizer on top of what is essentially relational algebra over tables. In all of these cases, a less effective tool could be used, yes. But "it's just a tool" doesn't capture the fact that tools do solve domain-specific issues, and OP is not wrong to seek an employer who acknowledges the value of Haskell has to add.

EGreg 5y ago

The guy should just join Plutus Pioneers program and become one of the first certified Cardano developers. Can't those guys charge like $1000 an hour? LOL

m1117 5y ago

Philly is the best. Everyone should come to Philly!

jpindar 5y ago

I would like a job writing any language.

throwaway889900 5y ago
I suppose "author" is out of the question.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hs211216 5y ago

I'm in a similar situation to Mark. I left my previous company at the end of 2021. I needed to take a break so I decided to take some time to learn Haskell better and study open source Haskell projects before starting my next job search. For what it's worth here's a list of Haskell hiring-related things I've come across. https://gist.github.com/hs211216/7e734535eadc869df26562b33db8249d https://gist.github.com/hs211216/7e734535eadc869df26562b33db...

mboes 5y ago

Tweag hired 50+ developers in 2021. We're aiming to hire 50+ developers in 2022. https://tweag.io/careers https://tweag.io/careers.

drstrangevibes 5y ago

beamatronic 5y ago

I would like a job using Motif to create GUI apps for UNIX workstations using plain C. edit: messed up some words

swamp40 5y ago

Cardano uses Haskell and Cardano smart contracts are exploding right now. Startups everywhere, or start your own.

lloydatkinson 5y ago

Honestly I'd just like a job writing code that actually benefits people or is even seen by the light of day. That isn't killed off by layers of mismanagement, "agile methodology", moving goal posts.

2143 5y ago

I don't know if OP is going to see this. I feel he'll be happy at Jane Street Capital. They use OCaml though (and I think they have a large part in building OCaml), but I suppose an expert Haskeller would have no trouble at all picking up OCaml if they want to. I don't know if they have remote work possibilities though.

joostd 5y ago

Not sure if this is still relevant today, but I registered as a Haskell developer at https://www.haskellers.com/ https://www.haskellers.com/ decades ago and for a while, I received a number of offers from companies searching for Haskell developers, primarily from fintech. Not any recent ones though. Also not sure if that’s because that site has grown old or because I have.

phendrenad2 5y ago

This is ridiculous. Of course there are no "haskell jobs". Nobody knows haskell. Looking for haskell programmers is like looking for a four-leaf clover. Actually it's more pointless because a four-leaf clover makes a nice instagram story. So if haskell is so great, why don't you teach a few of your friends to program in it, and increase the number of haskell programmers available? The only reason there are "python jobs" is because django exists. The only reason there are "ruby jobs" is because rails exists. The only reason there are "javascript jobs" is because browsers exist. The only reason there are "C++ jobs" is because algorithmic trading and video games exist. The only reason there are "scala jobs" is because the JVM exists (and concurrency is hard). What real-world problem does haskell solve that python does not, or what "killer framework" is implemented in haskell? Why not make it and prove that haskell is worth learning? All of that said, if you really want to program in haskell at a job, find a company that is all-in on microservices. They may allow you to write small services in haskell, as long as they know that if you leave the company, and they can't find one of the friends you taught a haskell for great good, they can find a java dev to rewrite it.