

Haskell vs Java job applicants - nickb
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-January/054072.html

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henning
One thing about getting something like a Haskell job that's rarely mentioned
is it seems like it's very much an all-or-nothing proposition. Casual or
intermediate dabblers who like learning new things like Haskell but aren't
total wizards get no points.

A lot of the investment bank openings for functional programmers want someone
who's doing a PhD in programming languages, from what I've seen, for example.

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madmanslitany
That's not necessarily true; for things like designing proprietary languages
themselves optimized for financial risk modeling, yes, you better have a CS
Phd. But it's definitely not the case that everyone who touches functional
programming on Wall Street has a Phd, and if you interview with the right
group within an investment bank, the technical interviewer might very well be
impressed with your Haskell experience, especially if you're going to be
working closely with quants (provided he knows what it is; there's a really
massive range in CS know-how within investment banks, but that's another
story)

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donw
I think it's more that people who program in $OBSCURE_LANGUAGE are much more
likely to have picked up that language out of interest, rather than from
wanting to have a cushy, decent-paying desk job.

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jrp
I wouldn't say that just because someone knows Haskell they are suddenly a
good programmer. Some schools use Haskell for their intro programming classes
nowadays.

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jimbokun
Which schools are that?

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ionfish
There are some listed on the 'Haskell in education' page on the Haskell wiki.

<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_education>

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nradov
It's still silly to hire a "Blub Programmer", regardless of whether Blub is
Haskell or Java.

~~~
fizx
What if its for a blub job, say, maintaining 20-year-old billing systems?
There's no value proposition in doing a rewrite, and the Haskell guy would get
bored silly, while the blub guy would be content, and plug away, doing solid
work for years. He makes a career out of it. And he was cheap. Everyone wins.
It happens all the time. It's perfectly reasonable to hire a blub programmer.
Whether it's reasonable to _be_ a blub programmer is a different story. :)

~~~
nradov
If someone is going to work for you for years then it's still silly to hire
based on knowledge of a particular programming language. In your example I
would focus my recruiting efforts on more fundamental skills and experience
such as accounting, maintenance, troubleshooting, configuration management,
and OO analysis. If I found a candidate with those abilities but no Java
experience I would be happy to train her on Java (or whatever).

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cesqui
So should the Python Paradox be renamed?

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sarvesh
That, I am sorry, is an inefficient filter. I used at one point believe anyone
who didn't know C++ wasn't a good programmer until I met a few people who
wrote applications in languages like VB and they were as good as C++ developer
would have done.

There are other ways to filter out résumés. Within 10 minutes into a phone
interview you can eliminate quite a lot of applicants and I for now just stop
the interview at that point. Once someone makes it through the phone interview
you are pretty much left with a good bunch of résumé to pick from for the next
round.

~~~
sofal
The purpose of a hiring filter is to reduce the false positives. Your
discovery of false negatives doesn't say much about the filter quality in this
respect.

If you could take random samples from the group of people who would apply to
Haskell jobs and from people who would apply to Java jobs and come up with a
measure of motivation/willingness-to-learn, I believe there would be some
statistically significant things to say. Samples from two mainstream (and in
my opinion, trashy) languages like C++ and VB might be harder to
differentiate.

As a side note, I've noticed that companies that can afford a large amount of
false negatives tend to have horrible interviewing practices. Google is in the
top two of the worst interviewing experiences I've ever had. When everybody
salivates over your company, you can afford use a quick and dirty filter that
hones in on any one arbitrary characteristic. As a matter of fact, one could
possibly argue that these lazy filters do better than more accurate filters in
the same way that Google argues that more data is better than superior AI.
It's stupid for people to look to companies like these for exemplary models of
interviewing.

~~~
Retric
The problem with Google is their filter also removes the most of the really
high end people. I expect there are far fewer people at standard keeping a 4.0
and doing interesting work in their own time than there are people keeping a
3.5 at the same school and building cool things. Add in a insanely long
interview process and poor salary's and many people they accept already have
other jobs that they like.

You can also see this in what they develop. They are good at incrementally
improving something like web mail, or online maps, but you don't see them
pushing into new areas.

~~~
nostrademons
Google can afford a lot of false negatives, but it can't afford false
positives. And from what I've seen, the interview process does a fairly good
job of screening them out. Maybe it's just my team, but I don't see a whole
lot of deadwood around.

FWIW, they hired me and I have nowhere near a 4.0 (it actually was a 3.0 +
interesting projects).

And _most_ successful products are just incremental improvements on what's out
there. You really don't want to be a true innovator: who uses an Altair, or
WWW (the browser, not the web), or AltaVista, or CP/M, or Visicalc, or
Betamax, or a Xerox Alto, or Xanadu? But if you put enough innovations
together, you get something really kickass like GMail. Going after established
markets is just prudent business sense, it doesn't mean they aren't
innovating.

(And there are some pretty crazy off-the-wall experiments that go on inside
Google to, it's just that nobody can talk to you about the ones that haven't
launched, and it's a good bet that 99.99% of the crazy stuff never will launch
because it's basically useless.)

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giles_bowkett
Python Paradox. You whippersnappers need to read Paul Graham's best stuff!

