[Haskell-cafe] What happens if you get hit by a bus?

[Ivan Perez]

Just like Michael, I've been learning what it means to be a professional
Haskell programmer for a few months.

I think the case of Ruby on Rails and Haskell are very, very, very different.

Ruby on Rails has been around for many years. There are books, tutorials,
examples, websites, etc. Still, there are not as many developers that use
Rails than those that use PHP, or Java, or .NET, or Python (for web
development). But there are many.

This is definitely not the case with Haskell. If you go around the internet,
it's not just that you can't find Haskell programmers with the necessary skills.
You also cannot find people demanding these jobs, servers that support
Haskell for web, or success stories to convince others and yourself that this
is the right platform for this job.

After several months, I just found the first client for which I'll
create a website
using Yesod.

Being a professional Haskell developer requires many skills that have nothing
to do with Haskell. Unless you are born with the talent of having the tax rules
embedded in your head, you'll have to learn them. Maybe the hard way. That is
true for lots of tasks related to social skills, design, management,
negotiation.
such as "how do I know what the client really wants without wasting
hundreds of hours", "how the heck do I show my client what I have in mind"
or "should this button go on the right or on the left and why should I care".

Learning them takes time, and most of us don't learn them unless we actually
need to. It's not that there aren't any people capable of creating
websites using Haskell, or Haskell programmers who could learn to do it.

It's just that not many people know enough, as of this day, to deliver
a professional
product with the results that clients expect.

In my experience, the following help:

 - Have a good portfolio, a list of websites you've created in Haskell
that shows they
have nothing to fear. If you can't find clients, create websites for
free. Sparked.com
may help. You'll know the list is good when there are great jobs that
you choose not
to include in it.

 - Ask your previous clients and those you created websites for to
leave feedback,
acknowledge your work publicly or recommend you on linkedin.

- Make a list of your competitors names and addresses (and put my name
on top of the list ;)
Haskellers.org may help. So can linkedin, guru.com, peopleperhour,
etc. If they ask, tell them
that there are tens of programmers with the necessary experience to go
on if they are not
satisfied with your work. If you want, we can created a group in a
social network just
for this, with the requirement that you must have created an actual
product to be in the group.

The amount of packages in hackage means Nothing to me. It means
nothing to my clients.

Good luck.

Cheers,
Ivan

On 16 December 2011 17:08, Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
> Michael Litchard <michael at schmong.org> writes:
>
>> One article addresses the question above. His answer was that he uses
>> RoR which has a large community and he is therefore easily
>> replaceable. My question, for freelancers in general, and web
>> developers in particular is this: How do you address this question?
>
> In this particular case, you could argue that more people know PHP and
> Python than Ruby, so surely one should avoid Ruby as well.
>
> Managers like to think of their company as a factory, and from this
> perspective, it makes sense to build your factory from easily obtainable
> parts.  But the factory mindset only works when you want to manufacture
> stuff, nobody who takes a minute to actually think will say that you can
> replace any programmer with any other, as long as they know the same
> programming language or framework.
>
> Anyway, here's something I found interesting in that respect:
>
>  http://www.dachisgroup.com/2011/12/cant-get-no-satisfaction-why-service-companies-cant-keep-their-promises/
>
> (This probably turned out less helpful than I intended, sorry :-)
>
> -k
> --
> If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe