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Because there they might find the programmers they are looking for.
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Itās not a great lookā¦
ā¦can you be more specific?
If you have a better proposal, I am all ears. awesome-job-boards lists three sites for functional programming: one is Functional Works, one Functional Jobs, the third is 404.
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funnelling traffic into rent seekers is bad even if thereās no alternative that doesnāt rent-seek. the reason they can be parasites on the community is that they marketed themselves to be the default go-to. unlike the free market theorem, supply doesnāt follow demand. instead, supply is created and then demand is marketed into existence.
if you outright state that there is currently no good place to connect functional programming job givers and job seekers, thereās a good chance of someone setting something like this up - it has 0 chance of happening if we keep pretending that there is a good place for that (there isnāt).
ultimately this makes the companyās chokehold on the functional programming job market even stronger, because it is seen as official endorsement from haskell dot org. which in the end means that increasingly more and more jobs will be going through companies like these, and that in turn means that every FP user will be earning 30-50% less because thatās a normal subcontracting rate for rentseeking agencies.
so this is why itās so bad - in the end itās very damaging to the actual programmers who spend time learning and perfecting these technologies.
eg you may not have been there to see it, but in a bunch of other communities job markets got cornered either by a bunch of really large consultancies (eg SAP, PHP), or outright by the technology developer (eg Oracle, IBM), and those job markets went down the gutter. earnings went down, the quality of open source projects suffered, and peopleās careers became dead ends. this is how communities kill themselves.
Oh yeah, I tried [PROPOSAL] Job posting platforms and moderation by hasufell Ā· Pull Request #54 Ā· haskellfoundation/tech-proposals Ā· GitHub
Given the mostly incredibly toxic responses, I think Iām not the only one who doesnāt want to try anymore.
Shaming industry has become a somewhat acceptable mode in the Haskell community.
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Shaming is never acceptable in our community. Guidelines for Respectful Communications
Iām not saying it doesnāt happen. But I believe that a large majority of our community believes in respectful communication, and (errors of judgement aside) practice it too.
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The discussion is diverging in multiple threads. I am splitting this topic, I hope you and other readers donāt mind.
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I am not entirely sure I understand the argument yet. I wasnāt familiar with the term ārent seekingā, but it seems to be term coming from economy: Rent Seeking - Econlib I do follow discussions about the FP sphere on the Internet, but I havenāt seen the notion of rent seeking applied to recruitment agencies yet. Is your argument basically that recruitment agencies set perverse economic incentives which disfavour individual programmers because they are worse off compared to what they should be able to negotiate in an idealized free market? And that we should therefore not advertise recruitment agencies? I just want to understand precisely what the economic argument is.
@cheater, thanks for your detailed reasoning, you raise some interesting points altough. I am sure you understand a case can be well made for a positive net effect of a recruiting agencies bothering with functional programming (viz. āfunctional jobā boards not existing).
Additionally ā from a practical point of view ā having and a go-to place for recruiters posting here in good faith is valuable, treats HR people with respect and will most likely make them more willing to engage with the community on future Haskell related job ads.
As now the job board policy seems very popular with the community (fifty likes is very broad consensus), so I wonāt change the job board suggestion.
Posts like yours are useful to clarify what the community thinks and what its values are. Make your case and if (now or in the future) the community shifts or new functional boards appear, we can review the decision, together.
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The problem here is that by stating āthere is something that works alreadyā you are making it impossible for something that works, but also doesnāt feed off of haskell programmers, to appear.
50 likes is probably due to the part of your post saying ādonāt post non-haskell jobsā, not due to āhereās support for a company that lowers everyoneās earningsā.
It might well be, even though I donāt think it is.
I welcome feedback from you, from the broader Haskell community, from the Foundation.
rent seeking is when you insert yourself between the source of a thing, and the consumer of that thing. a typical example, which the term comes from, is serial landlords who buy up whole neighborhoods, driving up housing prices for buyers, making the only viable option being rent.
job post boards used to be useful when actually finding this stuff was difficult: before search engines even existed and before they were as good as google is today. before the internet in the first place. and before you could go anywhere, and set up a free job post board, that no one has to pay for to either post a job or to read a job post. like reddit, discourse, lobsters, HN, and a million others. nowadays, recruitment agencies simply have no reason to exist - they insert themselves between jobs and job seekers, while taking a massive premium that comes out of the same finite budget that is meant for paying the hiree. in some cases, itās more than 50%: the recruitment agency takes more money home for being a gate keeper and setting up a single phone call, than the honest working employee takes for working 40+ hours a week, and this continues in perpetuity, for as long as the person has that job at that company.
hence ārent seeking is badā is the objection here.
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So can we assume that the problem you have is only to do with the redirection to the agency? (i.e. the requirement that a āHaskellā job must actually involve programming in Haskell or a very similar language is acceptable.)
as I read the guidelines, they donāt want us shaming individuals. However, companies, and individuals sometimes too, take shameful actions, which, especially when the prospect of hinging your whole existence off of that entity is being disussed, should be something that is allowed to be brought up. Being locked into an abusive, financially-dependent relationship is something that we should be allowed to help others in the community to avoid.
Why would an employer be willing to pay a whole second salary to the headhunter for the privilege of hiring a developer if it were as easy as you say to hire developers directly off of Reddit and Lobsters?
For that matter, why would an employer be willing to pay a whole second salary to one headhunter if another headhunter could do the same job for less, which they surely could if all there is to it is āsetting up a single phone callā?
Rent seeking is usually used to describe situations where some market inefficiencyāa natural friction caused by inelastic demand, a government regulationāprevents a free market from finding the appropriate value for a service. What inefficiency are you proposing exists in the hiring market such that the prices employers pay to headhunters are not representative of the actual value provided by screening and matching candidates with opportunities?
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Have you heard of Uber?
before it existed there was a thing called taxis where individual people would for a fee provide transportation to customers. Nowadays Uber takes 30% of every ride and nothing pricewise changed for riders. But for taxis they now have to pay a significant amount to Uber for the privilege of doing something they could do themselves.
We are the taxis and the headhunters are Uber. this isnāt the only example look at Youtube it takes 50% look at steam it takes 30% they all provide slight value to customers by being more convinient but take a significant cut from the people that actually do the majority of the work
i am not saying they do not provide value i am saying they take a disproportionate amount of the money compared to the value they provide
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ā¦wait a moment:
Based on that, I thought @cheater was referring to the situation where bosses hire the recruiters - could someone clarify this ambiguity?