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Comment by zero_shift | Hacker News Reader

Just been put on furlough with likely redundancy at the end of the national lockdown period. Absolutely devastated. My job was hard and the pace relentless but the work was extremely stimulating and my colleagues were absolutely fantastic people.

(It was also a Haskell gig, which is a real rarity.)

Right now I'm just licking my wounds and waiting for the lockdown to end. I'm not sure if it makes sense to start a new job right now - the UK furlough scheme is essentially guaranteed income until June. Starting a new job would waive that, so unless you're actually losing money on furlough I think it's a bit unwise to jump companies.

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I'm sorry to hear that dude.

Haskell is a demanding language, so you're almost certainly a pretty senior dev. If so, consider volunteering to help organizations during the downtime. Worst case, if you can't get that dream gig back it will certainly make your resume stand out when you're looking for your next thing. Best of luck.

Where can people volunteer with tech skills? Is there a demand for it?

helpwithcovid.com. I believe there is quite a bit of demand on some of these projects.

New York has a tech response team that you can volunteer with to help out: https://www.ny.gov/programs/new-york-state-covid-19-technolo...

See HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723098

Also, for data-related tasks, there's the DataKind group. Their UK chapter is very active: https://www.datakind.org/chapters/datakind-uk

https://crowdfightcovid19.org/

This is aimed at scientists, but my wife is on the list and tells me that they are looking for UX designers and software developers.

Any idea what kinds of software development skills they're looking for?

I guess if they're also looking for UX designers, they aren't looking for just data analysis code?

I don't have much information. I was told frontend and backend.

Edit: given the subject matter, I imagine there is demand for data analysis expertise, but that is my own speculation.

While not what you meant, if people with coding skills have free time, it is greatly appreciated if they contribute to open source projects that are widely used. A lot of OSS are critical components in many systems we rely on daily, your contributions can have more value than you can even imagine.

It would be great if all devs could keep this in mind, but especially the ones that are about to get some time off (if life does not get too stressful for you).

It might make sense to look now - at the end of the scheme, there will be a huge flood of people all looking for jobs at the same time.

Hang in there!

What are y'all doing w/ Haskell? Is it regular ol' programming and someone just picked Haskell, or is it a use case where Haskell shines exceptionally well?

Sorry to hear that. And I agree with your conclusion. However, it could be a good time to work on a side project (for no money) if you have any ideas, especially something that might help get another gig after the furlough. Best of luck and stay safe.

I see no reason why you can't start a new job, you can have another job and receive the furlough pay as far as I can tell [1]. This may be in breach of your first employees contract but as long as its a job in a slightly different industry few contracts would prevent you starting a new job.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-for-wage-costs-through-the...

OVO are still hiring and planning growth this year: I'm not sure on the ettiquette of reffering people, but sounds like it might be of interest. Cloud first, lots of flexibility in teams running their own microservices and a preference for functional programming (although Scala is popular, haven't seen Haskell yet in production). https://grnh.se/a2f788601us

I work for a remote company that writes Haskell and might be hiring at the moment. Email me if you're interested and I can share more details :)

edd [at] theoryof [dot] pl

> so unless you're actually losing money on furlough

Also UK and I am losing money as it's 80% up to 2500 pre month if your employer doesn't top it up, so for me that's a large pay cut, that said given the way things are I'm happy to take that cut knowing I'll still have twice what I need to cover the next 3 months before I have to touch my savings.

Whether I'll have a job at the end of whatever the lockdown period ends up been I've no idea, I think most likely I will but we'll have to wait and see, fortunately I'd been saving so I have enough to cover me from June well into next year in my "can access this money right now" account.

Are you still having to work?

No, if your company furloughs you, you legally can't do work for them - the approach is if you work you get full pay.

It sounds like now is a good time to learn a new skill for a few months. It would be unwise to quit now as a new job would not qualify for furloughing and if the economy turns worse you would be let go without any income.

If you are looking for a (relatively short) contract gig involving a Haskell backend that needs to be update please contact me.

Feel the pain. Same situation here, I'll be taking a 50% wage cut, coupled with the uncertainty after the government period if it goes that way on Monday.

Enjoy the time to recuperate and learn.

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