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What are the career prospects in F# ?

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What are the career prospects in F# ?

Since I've monitored the job markets for a while, I'd like to share some observation.

AFAIK, the situation is not clear at the moment. Except Microsoft and IntelliFactory, I've failed to see other companies recruiting F# programmer for now. As noted above, a few companies are recruiting functional programmers in general, not specific to F#. You'll also occasionally notice words like "Haskell" or "Lisp" appearing in some job ads, but it's basically like --- ... after a Looooong list of criteria .... and finally ... "It would be better if you also know Perl, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Lisp, Haskell, F#". I can hardly recognize these as recruiting F# or functional programmers.

On the functional land, after serveral months of monitoring (by notification mechanics provided by serveral major job websites), the number of jobs dedicated to different FPs is as follows (personal observation):

Lisp(Scheme) >~ Erlang > Haskell >~ OCaml > F#

>~ means greater than but quite close to.

By on 1/5/2008 3:03 PM ()

An interesting study and although it suprises a little me to see haskell slightly above ocaml, it doesn't suprise me at all to see F# at the bottom.

However, do expect to see this slow changed once the F# compiler is released as an offical product. I would guess a year or so after its offical release your likely to see the job adverts reach the Lisp/Erlang levels, if not surpass them slightly. I say this for two reasons:

- Microsoft will do a good job of marketing F# to programmers. We've already seen a few well recieved presentations on F# at the various TechEds last year and I know more are planned at country level Microsoft events. I think this will mean programmers and decision makes who perhaps would not of considered FP at all will start to look at F#.
- I believe (although I've not seen offical confirmation of this) that Microsoft will be offering an SLA for the F# compiler as part of the product release, making F# the first FP compiler to be offered with an SLA. I think that there are many IT managers who would not let a tool be used as a major part of a project unless they had an SLA.

Anyway making predictions like this is always a little dangerous, so you should probably take what I say with a pinch of salt, but I be interested to hear what others on this forum thought.

By on 1/6/2008 1:08 AM ()

An interesting study and although it suprises a little me to see haskell slightly above ocaml, it doesn't suprise me at all to see F# at the bottom.

Yes, OCaml was more dominating than Haskell for quite some time, but the situation just changed in the recent 1-2 years. Haskell saw a huge speedup on language evolving, popularity and even industry adoption.

However, do expect to see this slow changed once the F# compiler is released as an offical product. I would guess a year or so after its offical release your likely to see the job adverts reach the Lisp/Erlang levels, if not surpass them slightly. I say this for two reasons:

I agree with your prediction that F# will surely become one of the most popular among all the FPs in the near future. It can surely attract more programmers from the FP camp, but I'm not sure to which extent it could succeed in sharing the _mainstream_ language market. Especially, when C# is rapidly moving towards all the advantages of F#, what's the benefits of switching to F#? One may metion F#'s concise syntax and better support of functional features. For programmers already familiar with C#, the conciseness and beauty of F# syntax is rather a source of confusing; and C# already support anonymous function and type inference to some exntend, yes they look awkward for the moment, but it's just because they want to make a smooth and compatible shift and the situation can surely evolve alone the direction quite rapidly. Interactive toplevel won't be too difficult either (CINT comes into mind).

So if F# is going to productionize and stablized in the same way as C#, what's the point for the industry (even just those FP friendly fields) to switch to F#, given C# is a more mature language with a more mature implementation and extremely large number of programmers? I would hope MS to productionize F# in a way between the C# way and the IronPython/IronRuby way, i.e. an officially supported experimental language with an agile attitude to adopt (and even drop) language features, but also with a industry-level solid implementation (which means more man power).

By on 1/6/2008 5:27 AM ()

Well for the moment Microsoft is the only company actively recuriting F# programmers. There are several job adverts on Don's blog ([link:blogs.msdn.com]), which you've probably already seen.

I've also heard rumours that there's several big companies are looking seriously at F# but would guess that its unlikely that they will start actively recuiting programmers until the production version of F# is released (which I believe is quite away off). Having said that its unlikely that there will be any where near the number of post available for F# programmers as there are for C# programmers.

So why bother learning F# if thats the case? Well I believe there are two reasons from a career perspective:
- Learning F# will help differentaite your CV from the crowd - there's already a lot of C# programmers out there if so you say know F# it might help give you the edge over the rest. This is partically true as lot of people are saying they feel from learning F# they've learned a lot about programming and feel the exercise of learning F# was valuable for that.
- Any F# jobs that do become available are likely to the more interesting programming roles. Lets face it there are a lot of quite boring programming jobs theses days, that mainly involve get data from a database and displaying it to the user. I have a feeling F# programmers are less likely to recurited for these sorts of roles are more like to be recurited for the high-end programming tasks, such as creating programming tools/financial/statistical modeling/highly parallel programming etc.

Also, more out of curiosity that anything else, I would be interested in hearing if any one was involved in a commerical venture using F#, whether they are actively recuiting or not.

By on 1/4/2008 8:07 AM ()

FWIW, I was googling for something F#-related today and saw this on the Google Ad sidebar:

[link:www.janestcapital.com]

By on 1/4/2008 1:41 PM ()

FWIW, I was googling for something F#-related today and saw this on the Google Ad sidebar:

[link:www.janestcapital.com]

Actually, they recruite programmers of any functional languages. I usually met their ads when googleing keywords such as "lisp" "haskell" "ocaml" "closure" "types" "hof" "F#" etc.

By on 1/5/2008 2:35 PM ()

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