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I can't find a job in Haskell or Rust. Do I start a company?
2 points by _unrelated on Nov 23, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
The title says it all. Albeit a little dramatic.

I'm about five years into my career. However, it's been 95% full stack javascript / web development. I no longer enjoy building REST/CRUD (or GraphQL etc etc) style web applications

I want to work in systems engineering but I have no experience. I'm really enjoying the learning curve that exists with Rust and Haskell and I'd love to work on a system that uses these languages but I'm finding it hard to break through the interview process - let alone convince a recruiter to interview me when I have 5 years javascript experience.

I have enough runway (savings) to live without a job for maybe 9-10 months...

So far I'm considering

* Reverse engineering a product that already exists and use Rust/Haskell to build it

* Port an open source tool from another language into Rust/Haskell

* Pick a Rust/Haskell open source project and start contributing (The trouble with this is finding one that is at the right maturity. It's hard to find the right issues to work on?)

In essence, how the hell do I switch my career path at this stage in the game?

EDIT: Apologies for the duplicate post...I have idea how that happened.




1. Yes, the approach is right. You don't need to start a company, particularly if the project could be open source. Even talking about the project in local meetups (assuming there are meetups by the time you are ready to talk about the project) can also help. 2. Do you need to quit working? At least, do you need to quit working immediately to start on the project? Wait until you have something concrete. Work in your "garage" until it's absolutely essential that you quit your current job.


> I no longer enjoy building REST/CRUD (or GraphQL etc etc) style web applications This might be a problem with Haskell, since the majority of Haskell jobs I've seen (and had) are backend engineering jobs in support of web application and somewhat complex backend services layer. YMMV.

I work with a couple people who have transitioned into Haskell, from other dev positions. The usual pattern is that they are in a BE role in a related technology (kotlin, scheme, scala, scala), and have made open source contributions. I would recommend reading through "Haskell From First Principles", and getting comfortable with everything in there.

For a Haskell Aggregator I use: https://haskell.pl-a.net/




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