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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

It's a good idea to try to find a job this way, but given that he has been part of the Haskell community for a long time one might ask "Why can't he find a job using his network?" given his accomplishments.

I have never ever seen a job ad asking for Haskell, and the only time I needed to hire a Haskell dev (with NLP skills), a post to the Haskell mailing list led to zero replies, so we had to re-implement everything in Java.

Now I don't think this is a problem of functional programming not being popular, because there are some commercial shops using LISPs around.

I would like to read more blog posts about commercial implementations in "minor" languages.

View on HN

> Why can't he find a job using his network?

I think his blog has a fair readership, and constitutes a part of his network, so I see this as him doing exactly that!

Given that it's on the front page of HN right now, I imagine he's getting better reach than he might have from asking a few people he knows, so it seems like a very sensible thing to do.

> a post to the Haskell mailing list led to zero replies

There is Haskell Weekly with weekly job offers:

    As of November 2020, over 4,100 people subscribe to Haskell Weekly. 
    Over the last five issues, the average open rate was 37% and the average
    click rate was 16%.

https://haskellweekly.news/issue/301.html https://haskellweekly.news/advertising.html

Offtopic question: How can you (reliably) meassure open rate of a newsletter? I'd assume mail clients as well as webmailers preventing any sorts of tracking, and tracking only those that have lax privacy requirements would taint the whole metric, wouldn't it?

Yes, it does (Haskell Weekly uses Mailchimp):

  How we calculate open and click rates

  The open rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered 
  campaigns were opened by subscribers. To find this out, Mailchimp loads a 
  tiny, transparent image into each campaign, and counts how often the image is 
  loaded among the delivered campaigns. The image is invisible to your 
  subscribers.

https://mailchimp.com/help/about-open-and-click-rates/

Doesn't gmail prefetch images, regardless of someone opening the email?

With 4100 samples, you can do some statistics to estimate an overall open rate.

Yepp, but most mailclients block externally-linked content in HTML emails. Only inlined content is loaded.

And if you measure only those clients that ignore that/whitelist that, the metric is skewed/biased towards less-privacy sensetive users.

I remember looking through some random Haskell job board out of curiosity last year and an the listings were overwhelmingly for Crypto/Web3 startups, with pay ranges clearly not targeting US devs (I think mid $30s was a common low end)

> I have never ever seen a job ad asking for Haskell

I see those occasionally, even here, on HN: in those "who's hiring" threads, and a few linked from this thread. But they tend to be odd: working on astrology, cryptocurrencies/NFTs/etc, or other unfortunate conditions coming along with it.

I'm also writing in Haskell at work, though that started as a Perl job. But for the reason mentioned above, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to look for a Haskell job, even if you want to write in it: restricting jobs to just Haskell certainly makes it much harder to find openings in places that work on something sensible/useful, and satisfying other requirements (especially if you also include ones like remote work). Unless one is particularly focused on just the process and not on the result, using awkward technologies to achieve useful goals must be preferable to using nice technologies to achieve something of a dubious value.

> astrology, cryptocurrencies/NFTs/etc

they are eating rather a lot of the experts; there was prior concern here on HN (if I remember correctly) about the negative effects that has on the Haskell community as a whole if most talented devs work on virtual beanie babies. I think, because the crypto communities are putting so much money into formal verification and dsl writing advantages, it is good for the whole.

I would say his readers count towards his network. I don't think this is any different to somebody announcing on linkedin that they're looking for opportunities.

Haskell Developer - 6 to 12 months project - Remote (May 21, 2021) https://www.freelancermap.de/projektboerse/projekte/entwickl...

This is a posting from 8 months ago, also geared towards freelancers (not a permanent hire).

> I have never ever seen a job ad asking for Haskell.

I mean, just look at the Haskell subreddit or Haskell weekly news?

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