Is OCaml a hiring hindrance?

We get asked constantly if OCaml makes hiring impossible. The answer is no. We have not found OCaml a hindrance when hiring.

Here's the question as it usually comes up:

I love using OCaml, but I don't remember the last time I heard someone say they were a professional OCaml dev. Often a big decision in language relates to the pool of available candidates. Did you find the use of OCaml to be a hindrance when hiring people?

It's a reasonable question. The conventional wisdom is to use mainstream languages to maximize your hiring pool. We're not following that advice.

We have no intention of becoming a large company

We are currently a team of 3 with plans to expand to maybe 10 by 2026 EOY. There may not be a lot of OCaml devs out there, but there are more than enough to sustain hiring 7 people.

This changes the calculus entirely. We're not trying to hire 50 engineers in 6 months. We're not trying to scale to a 100 person engineering team. We're making targeted hires where we can be selective about who we bring on.

The hiring pool constraint only matters if you're optimizing for hiring velocity. We're optimizing for team quality and sustainability.

The Blub paradox is real

Most OCaml developers we interview are really high quality. Our problem in hiring is telling people we're sorry but we cannot hire them because we already filled the role.

This isn't unique to us. Jane Street reports they interview OCaml candidates at a 1-in-10 hire rate versus 1-in-100 for Java developers. They've built a 500+ person OCaml team that trades billions of dollars daily. Their conclusion: "OCaml tends to attract some of the best programmers, and leads interns to want to join the company full time; using OCaml has been a boon for tech recruiting."

The pool is smaller but the signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically higher.

People are eager to learn OCaml

For people we interview who don't know OCaml, they are eager and interested to learn.

This filters for a specific type of engineer. Someone who sees a new language as an opportunity instead of a barrier. Someone who's motivated by learning interesting technology instead of maximizing their next job options. Someone who thinks long-term about their craft instead of short-term about resume keywords.

The learning curve filters for curious engineers who want to grow. That's exactly who we want to hire.

We're not competing with FAANG

When you use Python or JavaScript, you're competing directly with Google, Facebook, and every well-funded startup for the same talent pool. Senior engineers at Google make $400k+ in total compensation. You can't outbid them. You can't out-brand them.

With OCaml, we're not competing with FAANG for the same candidates. Jane Street is hiring OCaml developers, but they're transparent about their extremely high bar. The competition essentially doesn't exist.

We went from competing with 500 companies in a crowded market to competing with maybe 5 companies in a niche market. The dynamics are completely different.

Developers as investments, not resources

A lot of organizations, especially VC-backed ones, treat developers as unskilled labor. Companies get funding, they need to grow, because more devs equals more output, and they choose technologies that let them get a rotating door of developers through.

We are playing a different game. We are not hypergrowth. We don't need to expand to a 100 person engineering team in the next six months. The consequence is that we are very targeted in hiring and make choices that may not scale well to hundreds of devs but are fine for low double digit devs.

As long as we can find interested and curious devs, we can educate them, and we hope to build an environment such that they want to stay with the company for a long time. They are an investment.

This changes what you optimize for. Average FAANG tenure is 2 years. If you're treating engineers as investments and optimizing for 4-6 year tenures, the upfront learning investment in OCaml pays off many times over.

When mainstream is actually better

This strategy doesn't work for everyone. Using niche languages for hiring makes sense in specific contexts and fails badly in others.

You're probably better off with mainstream languages if you need to hire 50+ engineers in 6 months, if you're in a secondary market without remote hiring, if your competitive advantage is speed-to-market instead of quality, if you're building standard CRUD applications without special technical requirements, or if you can't invest in training and long ramp times.

The strategy works when your core technical challenges align with the language's strengths, when you're optimizing for quality over velocity, when you can invest in people as long-term assets, and when you're not trying to scale to hundreds of engineers quickly.

For us, all four conditions are true.

So is OCaml a hiring hindrance?

No, we have not found OCaml a hindrance when hiring people.

The smaller pool filters for quality. People without OCaml experience are eager to learn. We're not competing with FAANG for the same candidates. We can compete on interesting technical work instead of pure compensation.

Other companies have made this work at scale. WhatsApp scaled to 450 million users with 50 engineers using Erlang. Jane Street trades billions daily with 500+ OCaml engineers.

We're building Terrateam with a team of 3 planning to grow to maybe 10. We interview high-quality candidates. People are eager to learn.

For our context, OCaml is not a hiring hindrance.