Presently:

• First draft of the ElixirConf video has been feedbacked, and I'll be watching V2 after writing this. Quite excited.
• Next up after should be a vlog of Code BEAM
• And then a local here to Varberg Sweden kind of vlog on the topic of networking (social)

Hiring and stacks

Use interesting stacks or pay fat stacks. Have a worthwhile purpose or make it worthwhile to serve your purpose. I talk to a bunch of developers and the patterns are fairly consistent.

People with a high level of interest in programming and tech prefer to work in stacks they like for one reason or another. Fun, sense of safety, high expressiveness, it varies why they like a particular set of tools. A lot of the people I talk to are fundamentally looking to only work within particular stacks (such as Elixir+Phoenix) or they are looking to move into the particular stack that they've learned on their own.

I did a job posting recently for a company which asked for people with experience in the Haskell, Elm and Purescript school of statically typed languages, along with some BEAM experience, bonus if they had banking/accounting experience. The response has been ludicrous. Not a deluge, I'm thankfully small volume, but let's say 20+ candidates in a week or so of which maybe 12 were applicable (EU only, rough fit for the criteria, individuals before agencies). From talking to them I think I've  sent on around 10. This has ranged from relatively inexperienced but excited and actively learning the tech to having literally spent a decade primarily doing statically typed FP.

Experienced and well-matching developers, proactively reaching out because they saw a listing where they don't know a thing about the company aside from it being FP-centric and a weird and interesting stack (which I mentioned in the post).

One in every four devs I speak to, around this and other opportunities, probably mention wanting to work on something that has a positive impact on the world as a strong driver for where they go next. Recently there were at least two that noted specifically that relocation was a deal-breaker. Completely understand. I was surprised that comes up at all. But all of the ones I've talked to have been opinionated about which stacks they want to work with to some extent. Some quite pragmatically "well, we chose React for hiring and onboarding, large org" and some really wanting to focus in on their preferred tools.

Building on an FP stack is uncontroversial at this point. Elixir is a simple example that feels much like building on Python or Ruby. I hear a lot of people have success with building services in Haskell as well. Of course there is Scala and Clojure that have been in active use for some time. I consider FP uncontroversial at this point. Some what niche, but not worthy of more debate than choosing OOP. My point is, this is a choice a company can just make.

I certainly have a massive selection bias towards getting stack-opinionated devs because I am one and my entire presence on the internet says Elixir across it. So my network is a special interest club that starts at the BEAM and spreads into FP.

If you are trying to build a tight-knit productive company with people that sweat the details and care about building well it seems that picking these FP stacks attract people very actively. I think the absolute majority of these candidates are good fits for the client and could do the job at their level of experience.

Choosing FP seems like a way to get a bias for experience or enthusiasm for free. I think that is powerful.

Downsides? Diversity probably. Slightly more of a bias to comp sci, and deep tech nerdery which trends white and male still. I have run into a decent number of devs who focus on business problems, product and don't mind doing frontend (or even have design backgrounds) during this search. I can't tell if that is a more or less common mindset in or out of FP. I think you risk getting a bit of a lower variety of backgrounds overall but I've seen a decent diversity of what path people took to reach their opinionated technical ideas. Overall I think the diversity angle is similar to tech hiring overall, maybe lagging a year or two in percentages but I don't have the numbers so I'm guessing at this point.

As we often hear, the tech stack you choose for building your product doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Having a good team matters and motivated team members matters. And apparently tech stack matters for team members and their motivation. So I guess there is this chance that the choice of tech stack is quite significant for your product, in the grand scheme of things.

What would you pick to build with today? What are you hoping is mature to build with tomorrow? I enjoy hearing from you all via email or federated at me through lars@underjord.io or as @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Thanks for reading. Much appreciated.