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The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

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Re: The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

#3

Post by tjbai »

> The multi-armed bandit is a really interesting problem in mathematical optimization... This problem is so interesting, in fact, that during World War II the Allies proposed air dropping copies of the original paper over Germany. The end result, or so it was theorized, was that German scientists would be so fascinated and distracted by the problem that they would abandon the war effort and cripple any German military research projects in the process.

This is incredible

Re: The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

#4

Post by kccqzy »

This is just a hiring problem, not related to functional programming. I agree with the basic premise of the article however: depending on the financial condition of the company, hiring people who are overly attached to or obsessed with a single technology probably isn't a good idea. But that's of course not exclusive to functional programming. Right now you will find plenty of people obsessed with Rust (not a functional language) who don't care about the business goals and only want to write Rust. A few years ago it was Go. Before that it was Node.js. A few more years ago it was Ruby on Rails.

Re: The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

#5

Post by dboreham »

kccqzy wrote: post #4

This is just a hiring problem, not related to functional programming. I agree with the basic premise of the article however: depending on the financial condition of the company, hiring people who are overly attached to or obsessed with a single technology probably isn't a good idea. But that's of course not exclusive to functional programming. Right now you will find plenty of people obsessed with Rust (not a functio…

For the casual reader: Rust is one of the most functional of the not-totally-functional languages.

Re: The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

#6

Post by chrisco255 »

tjbai wrote: post #3

> The multi-armed bandit is a really interesting problem in mathematical optimization... This problem is so interesting, in fact, that during World War II the Allies proposed air dropping copies of the original paper over Germany. The end result, or so it was theorized, was that German scientists would be so fascinated and distracted by the problem that they would abandon the war effort and cripple any German militar…

Sounds like an impractical (and ineffective) idea that was never implemented, so not actually all that incredible. Rather boring, inconsequential anecdote that adds nothing to the discussion.

Re: The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

#7

Post by lmm »

kccqzy wrote: post #4

This is just a hiring problem, not related to functional programming. I agree with the basic premise of the article however: depending on the financial condition of the company, hiring people who are overly attached to or obsessed with a single technology probably isn't a good idea. But that's of course not exclusive to functional programming. Right now you will find plenty of people obsessed with Rust (not a functio…

Not sure if this was a deliberate bait to demonstrate the problem, but Rust is a functional language in the modern sense (it has most of ML's features).

Re: The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

#8

Post by lijok »

tjbai wrote: post #3

> The multi-armed bandit is a really interesting problem in mathematical optimization... This problem is so interesting, in fact, that during World War II the Allies proposed air dropping copies of the original paper over Germany. The end result, or so it was theorized, was that German scientists would be so fascinated and distracted by the problem that they would abandon the war effort and cripple any German militar…

I heard something similar about the collatz conjecture that it was pushed/popularized by soviets to distract western development

Re: The Functional Programming Hiring Problem

#10

Post by bri3d »

kccqzy wrote: post #4

This is just a hiring problem, not related to functional programming. I agree with the basic premise of the article however: depending on the financial condition of the company, hiring people who are overly attached to or obsessed with a single technology probably isn't a good idea. But that's of course not exclusive to functional programming. Right now you will find plenty of people obsessed with Rust (not a functio…

This - I’ve had this same experience in both the FP, middle ground (Kotlin, Scala, etc.) and Rust space. It’s not FP, it’s that some engineers are interested in business goals and others are interested in conceptual goals. Those who are interested in conceptual goals gravitate towards conceptually interesting paradigms. Those who are interested in business goals gravitate towards business goals. It’s not mutually exclusive; I’ve met Scala and Rust obsessed engineers who also deliver; and Java engineers who can’t see past the next AbstractProxyFactory. But if I were forced to stereotype, new paradigms come with people who are more interested in the concepts than the goal (yes, I know FP isn’t new, blah blah, professionally speaking…)
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