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Comment by dsacco | Hacker News Reader

Jane Street Capital's Yaron Minsky once said that contrary to popular belief hiring for OCaml developers was easier because the signal to noise ratio in the OCaml community is so much better than other, more approachable languages. He would send a job post to the OCaml mailing list, get 15 responses, interview 10 people, bring five onsite and ultimately hire three new people.

I don't have direct experience with this, but it makes sense in theory. PHP is an easy language to find developers for, but it's incredibly annoying to figure out how competent the developers you're interviewing in that ecosystem will be. But languages like Haskell and Scala have a (perceived or real) barrier to entry, so you typically have a higher median ability among developers in those languages.

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I've got managerial experience hiring (on both ends of the spectrum of talent) and engineering experience in computational finance at a prop firm similar to Jane Street. He has a fast-hire ability and high-signal to noise for sure but he works at a prop firm. His hiring practices are a market anomaly simply because he can pay effectively whatever a competent developer wants. Jane Street can basically throw money at the problem. What you have at a 'normal' company is a real difficult time finding someone who can tell me when to use a lens and when to use a zipper in Haskell who are actively looking for employment.

Anecdotal but I casually attend Boston Haskell and I can't remember the last time someone was out of work other than 'funemployment' (e.g. a startup goes bust and they have accrued more than enough money to just sit around, stretch and work on pet projects). The second they 'need' a job, they'll casually mention it and I think ~3 out of the ~7 times this has happened, someone in the crowd went like "oh Bill, yeah come in to <his office> Monday and meet our CTO". No recruiters, no wait. The CTO trusts Joe has heard Todd ask enough insightful questions consistently enough that he's going to be a good hire. Tuesday 9AM HR, 10AM pull the repo down, setup stack, start poking around Haddock and start closing the easy tickets. Good talent (10 of the 15 applicants are quality) might respond to Minsky but those other 9 guys will be picked up almost invariably in well under two weeks

Thanks for adding more color to this!

The benefit there doesn't seem to be intrinsic qualities of your language, but the benefits of a small community of like-minded individuals.

OT but how useful would the boston haskell meetups be as an extreme noob? Will the talks be so far over my head that I should learn me a haskell a bit prior to attending or would it make for a good way to start absorbing some knowledge?

I haven't gone to the Boston meetup specifically, but my experience with other Haskell meetups is that the level of talks varies significantly, both in how much Haskell you have to know and how much general math/CS knowledge is expected.

If you're a beginner along both fronts (which is great: Haskell is a wonderful place to start), you might need to look at the talk topic ahead of time and choose ones which seem the most accessible.

If you're just a beginner in Haskell but comfortable with general math and CS topics, chances are that many talks won't be too Haskell-specific and you'll learn something interesting even if you don't get all the Haskell details. I've attended talks about things like succinct data structures, concurrency models, FFT algorithms... etc. All of these used Haskell and Haskell concepts, but weren't just about Haskell; you would have gotten something out of them even if you didn't know much about Haskell specifically.

I don't think most of the talks will be great for learning Haskell (unless that's their explicit aim) so if you actually want to learn the language you'll also need to do some reading on your own, but going to the meetups will still be valuable.

he can pay effectively whatever a competent developer wants

I think any niche language person would be delighted to be paid equivalent to Java or C# rates for their city or industry, to hack Haskell or OCaml or Lisp or whatever.

> Jane Street Capital's Yaron Minsky once said that contrary to popular belief hiring for OCaml developers was easier

No one will ever admit publicly they are having a hard time hiring because of poor technical choices, that would be suicide.

Cedric, do you have inside information of Jane Streets hiring difficulties or is it just speculation?

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