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People who are nervous about hiring people in a relatively unpopular language should watch this video[1] at the 1:01.00 mark by Yaron Minsky. [1] http://www.yo

• Cyranix 13y ago
  Imprecise transcript: Q: Are you convinced that you're more successful because of OCaml? A: <jokingly> I certainly have job security! But seriously, I think the answer is yes, for many reasons that are difficult to tease apart. One of the big reasons is that it became easier to hire great programmers. We hired many great programmers before we switched to OCaml (and they have since adopted OCaml) but it took more effort to find them than it took to find great functional programmers. It's hard to describe how significant the effect was, but I believe it was important; our language choice impacted our tools and results in a positive way.
  • gnuvince 13y ago
    Oops, that's not the passage I was thinking of. I'll try to find it again, but basically he says that when they needed to hire programmers, instead of using a site like monster.com or jobboom.com, they went on the OCaml mailing lists, posted the offer there. They got a few responses (~15 I believe?) and of those, 10 were worth a phone interview and 5 were worth flying in to NYC for a face-to-face interview. I think they ended up hiring 2 or 3 of those candidates. He described the process as being very easy because 1) OCaml programmers are interested in working with OCaml, 2) the typical OCaml programmer is better (or at least more curious) than the average programmer, because they went ahead and learned a relatively unpopular language that's unlikely to help them get a job in 99.9% of workplaces.