Haskell - Industry Adoption

[Peter Stampede]

Hi Vitaly!,

I've been following the Haskell community for sometime, joining meetups, watching presentations from Haskell greats and learning drips and drabs. I love the idea of using Haskell for my personal projects, but is it realistic to expect to make the jump from tinkerer to employed developer? Especially as a JR developer?

Are there any industry niches where Haskell seems to flourish? Or any big companies we can watch for job openings? (The equivalent to OCaml + Jane Street)
Maybe I can develop my skills with a particular niche in mind to help bolster my employability when the opportunity comes?

Thanks!
Pete

[Vitaly Bragilevsky]

Hi Pete!

Functional works hub does a good job of collecting Haskell vacancies: https://functional.works-hub.com/haskell-jobs. Standard Chartered is definitely the elephant in the room. They regularly post plenty of vacancies. Several companies have many Haskell projects in their portfolio (see https://serokell.io/ or https://www.tweag.io/ for examples). I wouldn't say that there is some specific niche. In fact, Haskell is usable everywhere, from blockchains and financial applications to web development. As far as I know, juniors are always welcome. I think we experience a shortage of developers at all levels.

[Peter Stampede]

Nice! Thank you for sharing those resources.

I would imagine this is one of the largest blockers to any language adoption. From the Dev's perspective "What's in it for me?"  I'm surprised and delighted to say Haskell has a good foundation in Industry that is ever growing. It's not just tied to a specific movement like going functional, Haskell makes sense to solve user problems.  

I work in DevOps. I was interviewing a few months ago for a new job and when talking with leadership at one organization I found they were heavily dependent on Haskell for real time data processing. I ended up getting promoted internally, but I would have loved the opportunity to work at this other company. Lesson learned there are some hidden gems out there. Small Big companies, or bigger small companies, which offer a great product and have a great tech team using Haskell. After those interviews I see the company all over TV when news stations talk about the airline industry and provide airline data.

[Peter Stampede]

Thinking about your comments on Haskell being general purpose, it seems more similar to Python than focused languages like Node.JS or C++. Haskell has a good number of high quality libraries to facilitate productivity in a lot of areas, which I guess translates to industry by not being pigeon holed into one small niche.