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We are a YC company doing very well, all our back end code is written in Haskell. We have produced a lot of functionality with a relatively small team. I would say we are existence proof that Haskell is good for business.



What happens when you need to scale up or if one or more of the gurus quits? Do you think Haskell will still be primarily used when you grow?


Ask Facebook. They are running Haskell at massive scale.


For what business units? For which use cases?

Also, they invest a lot into recruiting. My suspicion is that they give a considerable degree of freedom (often to the detriment of the organization in ways such as information silos) to engineering teams to help with recruiting.


For the problem you are solving and at your scale. Things start to change when you need to hire n+1 teams or engineers quickly.


They... might? I worked at a Haskell start-up for a bit. Hiring wasn't easy. But it doesn't seem to be easier at the mostly-JS start-up I'm working at now.



That doesn't speak to Haskell. You can say that's because there's not a lot of Haskell and that's likely at least partly true. But the difficulty hiring for a position depends on the number of people qualified and the number of other roles competing for those people. The fact that both of those numbers are smaller for Haskell than (say) Java doesn't tell us whether it'll be easier to hire for Haskell or Java.


True. Lets check the numbers. 90,000 developers took the survey.

Java: 41.1% 36990 developers

JavaScript: 67.8% 61020 developers

Haskell: 0% 0 developers

Jobs:

Java: 73,447 jobs

JavaScript: 59,647 jobs

Haskell: 492 jobs

https://www.indeed.com

Given the numbers, as a hiring manager, I will never ever suggest to any company to try to use Haskell or hire Haskell devs. I know many developers who use it though. They sucessful with what they are doing, turning business problems into Haskell problems and solving those. Sometimes patch the compiler, sometimes write a completely new one. As a tech leader I do not want to have these problems, even if I could hire enough people for projects (which I can't). I always like to read blogs about what is going on though. It satisfies my scientific curiosity but that is it.


Those are numbers. I'm not sure what they say, ultimately. If we believe them, then we can conclude: there are substantially more Java programmers, but substantially more unfilled Java positions, but a much bigger (... infinite) ratio of Haskell job to Haskell programmer, etc, etc. I'm not sure which of those wind up being most important.

I can say what I've said - that my experience of trying to hire the next couple Haskell programmers has not been harder than my experience of trying to hire the next couple JavaScript programmers.

There's also a big question of the quality of the survey, and how representative it's likely to be of your company's overall hiring pool - you say you have many Haskell programmers in your network, and your network is probably substantially fewer than 90k individuals, so something seems amiss.

I'm not interested in getting drawn into the rest of your ranting.


Yes indeed but not the way you think. There are many highly experienced developers out there who would love to use Haskell in their day job but currently can't. So your problem will be processing all the highly qualified CV's you will receive.


I cannot quantify “more than you think”.


Who determines that you are a very good company?


Who claimed they are "a very good company"?

The post simply says they are "doing very well" (financially). That is fairly objective.


Ok




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