How did you land a functional programming job

Question

I'd love to use a functional language for work. I don't think I'll truly master functional programing until I do it full time. All the jobs I see looking for functional programmers appear to be looking for experts. I've 8 years as a generalist web programmer.If you are now a full time functional programmer, how did you get there?

logicslave · Accepted Answer

Most functional programming jobs I've seen are in big data/ml using spark. These would be in scala, a wonderful language. A deep understanding of spark will get you a scala/ml/big data job. Beyond those jobs, functional jobs are indeed quite rare

continuational · Answer

I was working in a tiny Java focused department of a larger company, and everybody in that department happened to have an interest in trying out Scala. We tried it out in an isolated project, and it worked very well, so we went ahead and used it in more projects.
There's always the issue of "where will we find people who know Scala?" of course. I can't tell if it matters; certainly, there are fewer people with that skill, but they are also competing for fewer jobs.
Later on we started a company together and went all in on Scala. It's served us very well over the quite a few years we'be been going now.

probinso · Answer

unfortunately one of the best ways to make a mark and functional programming is to contribute to open source projects supported by companies that use functional programming. you can also focus on Research companies. there are a lot of research contractors that have strong functional programming communities like Galois, MSR, and Charles River analytics. companies that focus on programming languages and formal methods. finally becoming proficient in a language like F# or Elm scala has a lot of application and supportive industry market.I would suggest following conferences like strange loop, for some reason a lot of speakers for strange loop work with functional programming languages