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Note: this page is under development.


1 Haskell Advocacy

1.1 At Work

Many people wonder why a language offering between 4 and 10 times better productivity hasn't swept the software industry yet. If you are working in the industry then you may already have had some conversations with managers about the possibility of introducing Haskell, and found that they always have some reason why this is not the right time or place. Maybe in a few months, or on another project. But not this one.

This page is intended to help programmers understand what the real obstacles are and how to overcome them.

1.1.1 Management Structure

Any large technical organisation can be divided into three groups. At the top you have senior management, who are there to set the overall strategy of the organisation and make sure that the big things happen to keep the organisation doing what it does as the world changes around it. In the middle are the middle management who take the big strategic plans and turn them into discrete projects and work packages, and at the bottom are the engineers who actually do the work.

Thats the theory. In fact things are not actually this simple. The middle managers are generally fully occupied with the "day job" of keeping the organisation ticking over, serving customers, meeting deadlines and generally making sure that the organisation does tomorrow what it is doing today. Any large organisation can only survive if these people are really good at this job and pay close attention to it, to the exclusion of almost anything else. And so large organisations have evolved a set of mechanisms to ensure this. Whole books have been written about how the senior management can motivate these people to do their jobs as well as humanly possible. So whenever you talk to one of these people about change, their first thought is how it is going to affect their primary job. If it makes that job harder, they won't want to know. And this is in fact a good thing, because if middle managers didn't keep a laser-like focus on doing their jobs well the organisation would not survive.

1.1.2 Senior Management

Talking to middle managers about change is generally an exercise in frustration. So lets cut out the middle men and go straight to the top. Someone like the "Chief Technology Officer".