At ZuriHac 2023 I presented the results of a previous HaskellerZ talk where we wrote a small Reddit crawler to collect Haskell job postings over the years:
Looks like Covid managed to make a dip in the curve in 2020.
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It always amuses me how overall computer programming job market has exploded in the recent decade. I would like to see how growth of haskell section looks like compared to the overall market.
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True. Although the Haskell job market has grown, it may still be that the average individual has a harder time finding a Haskell job, because of the possibly slower growth compared to the overall market and also maybe increasing interest of engineers working in an FP field.
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Good to have some concrete data on this at last!
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I must agree with hackandthink on HN that the data is still not vetted optimally, e.g. these are not Haskell job postings:
- 02/01/2011 16 The F# Team are Hiring (functional programming jobs)
- 08/27/2022 425 Looking for a Haskell Job in Germany
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@nh2 So… Would it be hard for you to use the same crawler to collect data about, say, Rust (a thriving language) and Perl (a dying language), so that we can tell where Haskell sits in this comparison?
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I will leave this to somebody else, as the main work is to manually read all the post descriptions and delete the wrong ones (which should bring the error rate down to ~1% but it’s still no perfect, as @jaror wrote above I missed some).
Thanks, if you find more, please post them here or on an issue, so I can remove the remaining false positives in the next update (if Reddit is still a thing by then …).
If what you are interested in are relative numbers, then you can assume that the rate of false positives is independent of time and language, and do your statistics on whatever numbers your crawler furnishes you with. I think this is a fair assumption to make, maybe after checking a few results from each bucket against common sense.
The only relative number that matters is jobs relative to Haskellers who wish to write Haskell professionally. It’s silly to put a value judgment on Haskell’s growth vs the market or other languages. It’ll just lead to the same conclusion - niche language is niche.
Anecdotally, I’d say since 2016 (when I got my first Haskell job), I went from occasionally finding a lead or two to know many leads on Haskell jobs. Each new job change has had more choices than the last. So I’d say it “feels” like growth to me.
Hard to actually measure it anyways. JDs aren’t head count. A company could hire one person for a JD or be building a team - or team of teams! We just don’t have that data.