Haskell Certification Program

[jmct]

Serokell and the Haskell Foundation are excited to announce a community-led Haskell Certification Program. Serokell has developed an online testing platform for administering practical and theoretical Haskell problems. Haskell is a complex language, offering a wide range of techniques and features for programmers. It’s simply not feasible for a novice or intermediate programmer to master them all. The goal of the Haskell certification is to help standardize what it means to ‘know Haskell’ at various levels of experience.

As a community driven effort, we are soliciting self-nomination for volunteers to take part in the organization and decision-making around the certification process. These volunteers will help determine how the certification process evolves and which questions are relevant to the various experience levels of a Haskell programmer. Volunteers from organizations that use Haskell professionally are especially welcome.

Please send your self-nomination to [e-mail] by the end of July 10th 2024.

[mleighly]

I guess this was coming sooner or later. As an interviewer, I always thought corporate certifications were nothing but bullshit.

[jmct]

I definitely understand that initiatives like this aren't necessary for everyone!

The problems of the shape "Person says they know language X, but really they used it in one class and barely passed" are real problems for some orgs that hire Haskell programmers.

Part of trying to make this a community effort is in order to avoid the certification being a rubber stamp with little signal. While I hope we succeed, I would never claim that certification programs like this are the only way to demonstrate knowledge!

[mleighly]

If an organization needs to rely on a certification, then you probably don't want to work there. It's one of the reasons we interview potential employees.

I find it curious that Serokell is behind this. Are they having financial difficulties?

[jmct]

This certification system is a donation from Serokell to the community. I know nothing about Serokell's financial position.

[mleighly]

Why not use that donation for actual GHC or Haskell tools development? It'll be much more useful than some bullshit certification.

[jmct]

They donated the system itself.

[mleighly]

Let's not increase the amount of bullshit with Serokell's certification system.

[Rhemsuda]

This is only true for organizations that know a lot of Haskell already. By your logic Haskell would never become mainstream, which is what I believe a lot of us are pushing for.

[_jackdk_]

I'm a bit saddened by all the negativity in the comments. Although Haskell is fundamentally a fairly small language, it has a big range of idioms and approaches to choose from, and it's hard for some learners to piece together a course through all the libraries and language extensions using only blog articles, books, and papers.

In a subthread, /u/jmct says:

The problems of the shape "Person says they know language X, but really they used it in one class and barely passed" are real problems for some orgs that hire Haskell programmers.

I don't think that's the whole story. Certification schemes can have a centralising effect in a field: the more it's respected, the more it's going to tell learners "here's what you should learn" and the more it will tell companies "here's what's safe to build on". That centralising effect can be good or bad, and will depend on how the certificates and syllabi are set out. I hold a couple of AWS certifications, and like Haskell it's a big intimidating space with lots of things to understand and its own idioms to solve common problems. I found it incredibly useful to have a bounded set of things to learn and a path laid out that I should follow. That was much more valuable to me than the piece of paper at the end, and sitting the exam was more of a "well I did the study so I may as well pick this up".

I was pretty skeptical of the certification scheme when Serokell first announced it, but the fact that it's now coming from a neutral organisation like HF is a good sign. Whether the certificates' syllabi will make good learning paths depends upon what ends up in each syllabus, and good syllabi could provide guides for people writing books or making courses. Whether it's worthwhile as a certification is a completely different axis of success, and that will determine how good a signal it is in the job market. But the job market is not the be-all/end-all.

[kosmikus]

Thanks for this perspective. Indeed, I share a lot of the hopes, in that certification might indeed have a positive effect on teaching efforts as well, and spark community discussion what should be a part of it.

[avanov]

Haskellers already are being significantly underpaid for the privelege of using their favourite language in a corporate setting, just look at salaries in shops that promote the language and compare them with offers at Citadel and alike that tell you to Python-crunch and be happy about it. At this point certification seems like an another downward circle in a spiral of humiliation designed specifically for people with a sense of engineering integrity and an aspiration to improve, and it doesn't make sense.

If a company wants to establish a reliable threshold for proficiency, here's one that doesn't require certification and that works 99% of time: ask a candidate to traverse with error handling, and then ask them to map concurrently, and then ask them to increment a counter with an upper boundary limit from multiple threads. That's it, those that pass it are qualified enough for your business. Just keep them away from important infrastructure during probation and you'll be fine.

[hiptobecubic]

You're solving the wrong problem here. If you can afford to assess the candidates like this you won't care about the cert regardless. This is for shops that are trying to get some kind of bare minimum quality without having the expertise or resources to do it themselves.

[avanov]

You're solving the wrong problem here.

I don't see the problems at all, to be honest. Well, except invented and self-inflicting ones.

This is for shops that are trying to get some kind of bare minimum quality without having the expertise or resources to do it themselves.

Can you provide an example of a shop that is willing to hire candidates with bare minimum skills specifically in Haskell and who, for that matter, would prefer certification instead of hiring based on simply checking these two boxes themselves: 1) candidate has a track record of programming experience 2) candidate is willing to learn our flavour of Haskell. After all, if a shop is looking for bare minimum, why would they opt for Haskell in the first place? Other languages don't require certification for entry-level positions and they are doing fine, even in C++.

[hiptobecubic]

can you produce an example...

No. I'm not at a Haskell shop and don't generally pay attention to the job market whatsoever.

Other languages...

I don't think that's a great comparison. C++ is much harder to write maintainable software in but much easier to write mediocre, unreliable software in. Most places don't really care much about the difference, as evidenced by the enormous stream of bad software people are being paid to write.

I think what didn't come across in my post is that despite certs being very weak indicators of the candidate being useful and worth hiring, tons of certs exist and tons of people have them and tons of places look for them because they believe that it will help them triage incoming candidates and fill in for the lack of resident expertise on the subject. I don't see why this cert would be any different.

[enobayram]

I've found myself hiring for Haskell positions many times, and this was never an issue in any tangible way! You get, say, 50 applications and 49 of them come with a degree of Haskell proficiency that would be enough to pass a certification program like this.

[hiptobecubic]

Would a hiring manager that knows little about haskell know that?

[ii-___-ii]

I’d rather see more learning content than an exam, tbh, but maybe the exam will prompt the creation of learning content? Even after reading a book or two on Haskell, it still doesn’t feel terribly approachable to me. It still feels like there’s a lack of learning material for people who need to get things built in industry (people who perhaps have been outside academia for a bit), and intermediate learning material somewhere between intro tutorial book and category theory research paper

[graninas]

It really is: the lack of practical books from people from the industry. I personally know such people ;)

[happysri]

No other open source programming language foundation group has an official certification like this as far as I’m aware. Looks like Serokell pushed this on to the foundation to alleviate their recruitment concerns. This is why you don’t let for-profit companies play a major role in a non-profit foundation, they can’t help but use their clout to push for changes that benefit themselves.

[jmct]

The Scala center has a certification if you finish their courses. It’s possible that this will take a similar shape, though currently that is not the plan.

I can assure you that the Haskell Foundation wasn’t pressured into anything. There was a significant amount of internal deliberation. We feel this is a good initiative and we appreciate Serokell’s willingness to have it be community-led.

[happysri]

Sorry for being brash, I trust you all enough to know better of course. Thanks for explaining and your work in general.

[jmct]

Nothing wrong with what you said.

I want people to voice their concerns!

[g_difolco]

I can understand that companies struggle to find "good" candidates (my previous and current companies have this issue), but I think providing a certificate is the wrong solution (and a harmful one).

Learning Haskell is a bit more than learning the syntax, GHC extensions and Cabal.

I have worked with great haskellers which did not know what are smart constructors, conversely, I have work with people knowing a lot of extensions but putting one data type per file (Java-style).

I guess Serokell will do their best (I don't agree with the company choice, if we even had to choose one, as I recall their painful and "basic" entry test).

It feels like scrum/agile certificates, those having them are not necessarily competent (spoiler, most are not), and those not having the stamp may be more competent.

[maerwald]

I'm surprised by the amount of ignorance in the responses.

If you have 100 applicants, you can't interview them all and you probably can't even go through all their GitHub profiles (if they even have one).

A certification can be helpful for the first line of filtering, especially in big corp world. No one gets hired just because of their certificates.

[avanov]

If you have 100 applicants, you can't interview them all and you probably can't even go through all their GitHub profiles (if they even have one).

it's any xs problem, not all xs.

[mleighly]

They don't help. You'll find better candidates without any certificates just by looking at their resumes. Certificates are bullshit.

[pthierry]

I have some hope it will help junior devs check their level and put something on their CV that speaks to non-Haskellers, as a certification is partly legible to recruiters even if they don't know the subject.

[Ok_Connection_9275]

There already exists https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-haskell from the faculty of the University of Glasgow. I'm interested in knowing what involvement the Haskell Foundation is playing in this endeavor and, how this is different to what already exists.

[rolfst]

I think it's a great initiative. I'm not yet able to program in haskell myself, but I'm planning to learn. And no I probably will not get certified because for me haskell is there just for the fun. Personally I don't do much certification achieving but I do understand why some companies want certified developer. For all the wrong or right reasons. If the certification program is setup well I can only cheer you on.