I was a bit worried when my technical partner Gracjan told me he wanted to go with Haskell for building our application. Not that I knew what Haskell was. Most people don’t, not even experienced programmers. That’s what my hacker friends told me when I consulted them about the technical choice. So that was what made me worried. I knew we would have to have high speed to build a robust business before the big wave of big competition would be coming around and splash the small players. So how should we grow the business fast if we wouldn’t be able to find programmers to do the programming?
My hacker friends were excited about the choice though. They told me Haskell is a piece of hardcore technology and for someone to want to do an application in Haskell that someone has to eighter be very stupid or really know what they are doing. Upon meeting Gracjan they decided for the latter. I still wasn’t convinced though, I didn’t know Gracjan yet and I couldn’t tell if he really knew what he was doing concerning the tech choice (later I found out he didn’t, it was a gut feeling).
Haskell
The following weeks I did some digging around on the Internet to find out more on the topic. I couldn’t find much but most of the stuff I could find was hackers praising it, Google staff arranging a hackatons in Zürich and making PPTs about Haskell being the future, excellent for parallelism thus supporting the increasing speed of multiple core processors, pure, flawless, secure, cool, hard, superlatives all over the place. Negative comments were nowhere to be found. My googling skills might not be on top of the world but could I be that bad? The only thing I could find against were forum posts by programmers discussing the value of learning Haskell as almost no one was really using it for commercial applications. How could you ever get use of your skills if no one would hire you? Well, except for some high-end Wall Street banks and the American government building cloud platforms for storing internal and sometimes top secret documents.
The equation
A business guy as I am of cause I started to think of the topic in terms of demand and supply. On the supply side I figured this: Haskell is apparently hard to master for the weaker of mind so the worst lemons in the basket would be easily ruled out. People wanting to work with Haskell generally know what they are doing. So if anyone would apply those probably would be bringing something of value to the table. Also there seemed to be some hackers out there really wanting to work with the technology so it shouldn’t be impossible to get someone to apply. On the demand side I figured this: nobody is employing programmers in Haskell. So my conclusion was: there is excessive supply and not enough demand. That should bring prices down and being a bootstrapped start-up we might actually be able to afford those top-notch programmers. Not because we pay well but because we can provide some good hacker fun. That could really be an edge.
The decision
At hand I had a great programmer (Gracjan) excited about the prospect of being able to work with Haskell full time. Actually Gracjan had already started out doing some programming and was reporting small progress and mostly loads of fun. I thought about my own passion and what that would mean to the company future (everything) and I thought that passion comes from fun and doing something you really want to do. I wanted my partner and our co-workers to be as passionate for the business as I was as I believed that that would be great for business. So I figured, Haskell might not be such a bad choice after all. A gamble, yes. But with good odds.
The result
Unexpectedly good. We are now rapidly approaching launch of our first version of the app. We have a team of six programmers (five in Haskell) and three suits. Most are working for free or to a minimal salary. One is even asking permission from her boss at a finance bank in London to decrease work hours to be able to join our team at a part time basis. The programmers are dispersed all over the world: China, Poland, England and Sweden. One is backpacking in Asia with his fiancée and just delivered a huge patch after having crossed the Himalayas during two weeks. And there is a lot of hard work, passion and fun. It’s just what I wanted so I’m very happy so far.
The price and some new opportunities
The price we had to pay to manage finding the programmers we needed was to do global search and thus making a virtual team working mostly from home wherever they are at. It puts quite some pressure on management to coordinate virtually. We do it with an array of cloud-based apps: stand-up meetings every morning over Skype, task tracking with Pivotaltracker and coordination through Google Apps calendar functionality. This will of cause be a problem when we need programmers to be on spot to tend to customers integration needs. Yesterday Gracjan and me talked about this (over Skype) and figured that it might not only be a drawback. If we split the teams and create an integration unit close to the customers and keep R&D global we might be able to offer something unique to many programmers out there: work from wherever you want, maybe backpack around the world, earn money and work with a really exciting technology. Freedom, riches and fun, isn’t that a good equation? Well, the future will tell. Lets gamble some more.
3 kommentarer:
Interesting
Awesome! I wish there were more businessmen thinking like you.
Thanks! Happy you found it inspiring. Hope it can be useful.
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