I remember going to a happy hour at a large consulting company I worked for and 95% of people had never heard of Haskell much less knew anything about it. So needless to say I was easily pulled away from that company when the next person I interviewed with had written production Haskell code.

I find this to be odd. Haskell seems to be the one language where recruiters lead with "we program in Haskell here" before saying what the company does.

Do people really choose companies based on the language they are using?

"We Program in COBOL!"

(Walks away slowly avoiding eye contact)

A bit less facs- fascatio- fesceeshus- silly, companies that aren't smart enough to invest in good tools probably aren't smart enough to invest in good people. You can overdo the tech worship, but you can totally underdo it and cost yourself a bomb.

At some point, money is no longer an issue (or falls into diminishing returns), and I'd even take some amount of a pay cut if it meant working in a language and on projects that were mentally stimulating

But even this is odd to me.

Programming seems to be the easy part. The hard (and stimulating part) is everything around that. If somebody says that they work in Haskell but doesn't say what they are working on then I'll just be confused.

To me, it is like selling a company based on where you put the curly braces (a slight exaggeration here).

Haskell is less of a programming language and more of a religion, so people choosing companies based on their religion makes sense.