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Comment by runT1ME | Hacker News Reader

So, there are Scala teams doing functional programming. Have you worked for them and ended up not happy? It seems that it would be much easier to get good enough to join the team you want and appreciates you than to switch careers. Are you in the US?

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There is functional programming and "functional programming". Nowadays people would label anything as functional programming. I worked for many Scala teams, and everything is super functional, but truth is the opposite. Most of people don't know how for {} works in Scala or what functor is. Which is fine, no hard feelings, I didn't know about it either couple years back. But at least don't trademark your company as 100% functional codebase :/

I'm not in US, but Europe. Akka everywhere. If I have to debug one more akka spaghetti system I might as well switch to Node.js.

edit: I know/follow you and your work. Kudos for everything and doing functional Scala :)

edit2: I don't mean to insult Akka, it's great tool. It's just easy to misuse (like anything), and people misuse it a lot. At least from my experience.

Having been on all sides of the fence..

It's not the language. Or the purity. No amount of changing the language you code in will increase your happiness, past a month or two.

You either find fulfillment as a code monkey, or you don't. I don't find it fulfilling, but I find starting a startup to be so. You have to pick for yourself what makes you happy.

Brian

I'm not saying it's language, but I can tell you that I enjoy working on X more than on Y.

I think code monkey is a bit pejorative, especially when programmers are critical to many businesses :)

Thanks for the kind words. My suggestion, if you're willing to work in the U.S, look for a company that is actually doing FP (Verizon, Comcast, Stripe, some teams at Facebook, some teams at Twitter) and try to work there. Also, programmers are treated much better in the U.S. than they are in Europe from what I understand. Compensation, perks, respect, etc. are all immensely higher. Not as important as working with the right team, but it does help.

Our team is not perfect, we have a lot of the same issues you find at most companies(some good code, some bad, large company red tape, etc.) but, we also have a lot of good things: many people who either know FP or want to learn, good infrastructure support, freedom to innovate, lots of open source, etc.

It's enough of the good stuff that I'm much happier here than I was at my previous job. I don't agree that all coding jobs are the same. Most days I'm working hard but working on fun and interesting problems.

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