[Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com profiles: advice requested

[Michael Snoyman]

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Vo Minh Thu <noteed at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/10/7 Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>:
>> On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 8:14 PM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> One (slightly off-topic) question: at the top of the site it says "the
>>> meeting place for professional Haskell programmers".  Is this supposed
>>> to be geared towards Haskell programmers who get paid (or want to get
>>> paid) to write Haskell?  If so, fine; if not, in my opinion the word
>>> "professional" ought to be dropped.
>>
>> The fact is that the site has two functions: on the one hand, it's
>> simply a social network for anyone connected to the Haskell world. In
>> that sense, the word "professional" is inaccurate. However, the second
>> function is to encourage Haskell usage in industry, by showing a large
>> number of highly qualified Haskell programmers. In this sense, the
>> word professional is very apt.
>>
>> I hope the word professional isn't scaring off the hobbyists; I would
>> definitely want them to be signing up on the site as well. But as far
>> as the "marketing" of the site goes, I think our main goal should be
>> impressing industry.
>
> Hi,
>
> Does this mean it is possible to accurately distinct a hobbyist and a
> highly qualified professional within the site?

No. Firstly, there can be a very fine line between hobbyist and
professional. At my previous job, I did 95% of my coding and SAS and
VBA (the lovely insurance industry). However, they had one project
where we needed fast parsing of large binary files and I used Haskell
for it. I would have considered myself at the time a Haskell hobbyist,
but it's not really clear.

Secondly, the only information which is verified on the Haskellers
site right now is email address. I have plans to add badges so that
people can be verified, but I'm hesitant to do so right now. You can
get an idea of how "professional" a Haskeller someone is right now
based on their years of experience and their description field.

Michael