Hey Tikhon! The Haskell thing was such a great way to filter for interesting frontier people back in the day, as we both experienced. That was a contrarian bet at the time, but it paid off handsomely for at least a few of us. The number of people we'd get to interview was only a fraction of the broader population, but it felt like 30-50% of the people we would talk to were awesome fits.

I talk about that a bunch in https://www.kuril.in/blog/hiring-telling-your-companys-story... . I agree, finding your niche and doubling-down on it is a solid move.