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The Haskell job market has been growing steaily since 2008
- nh2 3y agoI crawled, and manually verified, /r/haskell Reddit job postings between 2008 and now. It turns out the Haskell job market has been growing steadily since then, with a dip during Covid.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FiberBundle 3y agoThe growth of reddit itself could account for a large portion of the growth in job postings on /r/haskell.
- cosmic_quanta 3y agoWow that's really cool. Good to see growth in Haskell in industry, given the original research focus. At my workplace, we've been toying with Haskell and we'll be putting it in production over the next 6-12 months. I might be placing some Haskell job adverts on reddit next year!
- macintux 3y agoDon't forget the monthly HN job post. This is my last social network (not that I know Haskell).
- hsavit1 3y agoWhat percentage of Haskell jobs are crypto jobs? I bet it’s high
- mighmi 3y agoHow'd it get high adoption in that field?
- hudon 3y agoSorry to be blunt, but it's probably because of how crypto is a Rube Goldberg machine that attracts similar tinkerers as those attracted by Haskell's Rube Goldberg machine aspects. Both technologies seem to be doing a lot of complicated stuff, and so they attract a kind of technologist that enjoys technology for technology's sake.
- Buttons840 3y agoMaybe. I thought it had more to do with smart contracts, where the the mathematical and research oriented nature of Haskell helps somehow? I figured it had something to do with the "if it compiles, it works" aspect of Haskell (granted, Haskell has bugs like any language, but it's closer to the compiles = perfect standard.) I know the one and only Haskell job I personally looked into was about smart contracts.
- anonzzzies 3y agoAnd using the latest webframework garbage react iteration is not tech for tech sake? Or worse tech for resume sake. At least with the former I get to enjoy myself.
- intelVISA 3y agoPlus, at least using Haskell exercises the mind: most web frameworks seem designed to keep one's thoughts sedentary.
- peterbecich 3y agoI like Scala and Haskell. The selling points of high assurances by their compilers appealed to me. Opinion: Something I did not anticipate is these languages allow a high degree of individual choice in coding style by a programmer, and companies tend to dislike this. I have read this sentiment about Clojure shops; the original authors are very capable in the codebase but it can be hard to bring in new team members later. It seems to me most companies prefer less expressive languages with opinionated style guidelines. I have never worked with Python professionally, but apparently there is a high emphasis on style consistency in the community. Obviously there exist projects in less expressive languages that are hard to maintain, so maybe ease-of-onboarding and ease-of-maintenance depend on something else. I still believe the type system of Haskell can provide great benefits to codebase maintenance over the long term. If the coding style were restricted and opinionated, it might assist with company adoption.
- nh2 3y agoThis is easy to answer, at least for this data set: It contains all job descriptions (see link to Google Sheet, scroll to bottom). From a 30 seconds look, it seems there are around 5 cryptocurrency jobs in the list for year 2022. You will find that currently the list of Haskell companies is quite diverse across industries, which is a big change vs. 10 years ago.
- amelius 3y agoHow many are in embedded systems?
- insanitybit 3y agoHow has it grown relative to the overall job market?
- xupybd 3y agoIs it worth learning Haskell with the aim of landing a job working in it? I'm not after FANG money but would love a job in a functional language.
- granshaw 3y agoAn Elixir job seems much more attainable?
- xupybd 3y agoI love static typing. But, I hear this is coming.
- adamddev1 3y agoYes please, I hope so!
- nesarkvechnep 3y agoI would say so yet. Elixir seem to be growing in popularity but finding a job for a junior is hard.
- consilient 3y agoYou don't know whether you want a Haskell job if you don't know Haskell yet.
- xupybd 3y agoI like strongly typed functional languages. I'd like to pick up Haskell and wondering if it would increase my chances of getting a job using a functional language.
- ff_ 3y agoIn all the Haskell teams I worked in, the candidate knowing Haskell was rarely a significant advantage (except for cases where the most experienced Haskeller leaves, and then you need to hire someone to direct your GHC-internals questions to). If you are interested in a job using a functional language you can pick basically any of them and then jump ship to a different one. I wrote Clojure for many years before switching to Haskell.
- behnamoh 3y agoMaybe this is a general time trend for many languages not just Haskell. Also, the real question is what percentage of jobs are Haskell related.
- riffraff 3y agoWhy is that the real question? If I'm looking for a Haskell job it's useful to know there are some, even if there are 100 times more for a different one. Absolute number and percentage are both interesting metrics depending on what you are interested in.
- EduardoBautista 3y agoBecause the post is implying that Haskell jobs are growing at a faster rate than other programming languages.
- charcircuit 3y agoBecause job listings = demand. It is not wise to invest your own time into Haskell from a monetary standpoint if there is no demand for that skillset. More job listings also mean that you there is more diversity in the places you can work. It is not wise to choose a company just because they have a tech stack that you are fond of.
- Barrin92 3y agodemand is created, jobs don't fall from the heavens like manna, it's people who pick new technologies and turn them into established ones, start companies and use them. Reminds me of a PG essay on why he chose Lisp when barely anyone else was doing it. "Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. We knew that everyone else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew that that didn't mean anything. If you chose technology that way, you'd be running Windows. When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best." http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- jacknews 3y agoMaybe I misunderstand; is this as it says, the cummulative number of jobs posts since 2008? So there have been 400 job posts in total? If so then we should look at the slope of the graph for 'growth', and it in fact appears to have flattened recently. And further, as the size of the market increases, you'd naturally expect more postings, if only because of churn. Are they definitely different jobs, new positions? It could be a handful of people are rotating around a handful of jobs that then need to advertise every few months. I mean, it's extremely likely that there are more Haskell programmers employed now than in 2008, but IMHO this doesn't show it very clearly, and doesn't show that the market is now growing. To me there seems to be some irony in that some nice pure stats about Haskell programmers seem so ungrounded.
- one-punch 3y ago> If so then we should look at the slope of the graph for 'growth', and it in fact appears to have flattened recently. The second graph shows the number of job posts per year, and it seems to reflect the bigger macro-economic situation: dip during pandemic, and a slight drop after 2022. I think these features are not specific to Haskell, just showing that the Haskell segment also follows some bigger trend.
- petersellers 3y agoIf the second chart is accurate then the first chart should be showing continual upward progress over time, but what we see is that the first chart is starting to flatten out around 2023. Either the term "cumulative" is being used incorrectly, or different rules are being used to classify available jobs in each graph. Maybe the first chart is filtering out duplicates?
- one-punch 3y agoThe second chart is bucketed by year, while the first chart is not (appears to have more continual changes). Also, the discrepancy you observed around 2023 is on the edge of the second chart, which can be the result of bucketing and it may not be that surprising after all.
- nambiyaar 3y agoMan I'm graduating in 2025...would be a dream to land my first job with Haskell.
- ilikebits 3y agoI spun up two Haskell teams at work, and now it composes about half of our codebases. Happy to answer questions about the experience.
- klysm 3y agoAny regrets?
- ilikebits 3y agoIn the broad scheme of things, not really. I think we waited too long to ship our initial prototype to customers, but a big part of that was that we were pretty sloppy in our product management at that stage of the company (I think we had closed the A about a year ago, and did not yet have our first dedicated PM), and our technical rewrite was also partially a feature and UX rewrite. It's been several years since, and we have clawed our way out of that hole, and I think our delivery process is actually in a really good place now. If I were to give advice to people looking at adopting new languages, I would say to get it into production ASAP. I believe the keyword to search for is the "tracer bullet pattern". One of my favorite blog posts on this is https://blog.thepete.net/blog/2019/10/04/hello-production/ https://blog.thepete.net/blog/2019/10/04/hello-production/
- amelius 3y agoIsn't the "tracer bullet" pattern what you get for free in many IDEs when you click "New Project"?
- _8j50 3y agoIf I may ask a naive question: why? Is there a specific advantage it gives you, like Ocaml in finance/trading?
- ilikebits 3y agoFor us, there were a couple advantages. For context, I work at FOSSA (https://fossa.com/ https://fossa.com/). Our core product solves software supply chain needs in enterprises (around licensing and security), and our core technology is around compiler, build, and source code analysis. Off the top of my head, 3 advantages stood out: 1. First, if you're not going that far off the beaten low-level path, Haskell has incredible productivity benefits. Effect tracking has enormous benefits for testability and understandability. If you've ever been down a debugging rabbit hole shaped like "there's no way this logging call is sending that API request", then you might be pleasantly surprised to discover that you can statically guarantee that this doesn't occur in Haskell programs! Pattern matching, algebraic data types (sum types!), and typeclass derivation make it much easier to make it impossible to construct invalid representations of data. Other languages are finally picking this up, but their versions of pattern matching often have caveats for backwards-idiom-compatibility. And monads are a very powerful abstraction. It's like being able to write your own semantics for async-await (I've talked more about this before at https://lobste.rs/s/7cllte/monads_part_six_really_what_is_monad#c_nbusni https://lobste.rs/s/7cllte/monads_part_six_really_what_is_mo...). 2. Haskell was a good domain fit for us. One thing we build is the FOSSA CLI (https://github.com/fossas/fossa-cli/ https://github.com/fossas/fossa-cli/), which runs in customer CI pipelines to analyze their builds. It's a very compiler-shaped problem: shell out to some tools, do a lot of parsing, think very hard, and then spit out a JSON blob to send back to the API. Our first version of this was written in Go. At the time of development, writing correct, testable parsers in Go was like pulling teeth. We have a relatively small headcount-to-product-surface-area ratio, and our team was running up against the overhead of rewriting traverse in Go over and over again (that's a Haskell-flavored joke, but if you've ever been annoyed at writing yet another for-loop in Go, you get it). We decided to hack out a prototype in Haskell, and it turned out to be a good fit. 3. Lastly, the kind of people who wind up working at FOSSA and are interested in the code analysis bits tend to be the same kind of nerds who love Haskell. We had lots of people on our team who were chomping at the bit to try it, so we decided to try it out. I really can't understate how big of a productivity difference it makes when people are working with tools that they actually enjoy rather than are merely forcing themselves to use. It is night and day. If you want to learn more, we also did an interview with Serokell on this topic (https://serokell.io/blog/haskell-in-production-fossa https://serokell.io/blog/haskell-in-production-fossa), and discussed it on an episode of our engineering podcast (https://fossa.com/blog/fossa-podcast-adopting-haskell/ https://fossa.com/blog/fossa-podcast-adopting-haskell/).
- hackandthink 3y agoIt's easy to look at the raw data. There are some surprises: 02/01/2011 16 The F# Team are Hiring (functional programming jobs) 08/27/2022 425 Looking for a Haskell Job in Germany
- pjmlp 3y agoApparently "failing at any cost" isn't working that well. :) Good to see the adoption growth.
- MaxGabriel 3y agoJust as one data point, Mercury has hired maybe ~120 Haskell engineers in the last 4 years. Some of that is reflected in these job posts but we definitely hired a lot more than we posted on the subreddit.
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoRepresentative of approximately 1 percent of activity. Most employers are not using a subreddit for job listings.
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- lmeyerov 3y agoIt'd be interesting to see the split of new vs old employers Ex: Is it new companies offering new jobs... Or largely a fixed stagnant list of companies locked-in and needing to replace + expand? Curious both by # co's, and % of jobs. Is there a few Haskell mega-employers out there, is it mostly replacement of existing with growth being from new co's, ...? (I used to measure adoption decisions here, and employment is an awesome angle!)
- CJefferson 3y agoWhile this isn’t a totally fair comparison, how does that growth compare to the growth of reddit? Is reddit just recording a larger percentage of the jobs over the years?
- voidbert 3y agoThank my university for hiring more professors due to the high number of students failing functional programming. :-)
- jpz 3y agoThe IT employment industry has been growing steadily since 2008 also. That graph which is shown above the fold is cumulative graph is, well, misleading.
- rus20376 3y agoSo does that mean Mark Dominus found the job he was looking for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30256012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30256012 Maybe that'd be a good canary in the coal mine of the Haskell job market, so to speak.