On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Paul Johnson <p...@cogito.org.uk> wrote:
> I'm starting to see job adverts mentioning Haskell as a "nice to have", and > even in some cases as a technology to work with. > > However right now I'm looking at it from the other side. Suppose someone > wants to hire a Haskell developer or three. How easy is this? I'd > appreciate replies from people who have actually done this. > I've had a fairly easy time of hiring Haskell programmers. However, when I do, I am actively recruiting particular candidates, who are active in the community, and who have particular skills that I am looking for rather than throwing out a net. The blogosphere, reddit, #haskell and stackoverflow all make pretty decent filters to identify and build relationships with good Haskell programmers -- especially if you are plugged into the community yourself. * How many applications did you get? > I tend to actively recruit rather than throw open the floodgates. * How many of those applicants knew what a monad is, or how to write > FizzBuzz in Haskell? > "Knowledge of Haskell" means very different things to different people. I'd be somewhat leery of blindly hiring someone based on their ability to answer a couple of pop Haskell quiz questions. A better test might be if they really understood Applicative and Traversable, or if they knew how to use hsc2hs; Talk about unboxing and when to apply strictness annotations, finger trees, stream fusion, purely functional data structures or ways to implement memoization in a purely functional setting, or how to abuse side effects to do so in a less pure way. Those are the kinds of things you get exposed to through actually using Haskell, rather than through reading a monad tutorial. -Edward Kmett
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