We have a large codebase in Rust. We're hiring devs who want to use Rust. Why is that "doing something wrong"?
edit: Maybe you think we require full Rust mastery on hiring. We don't. Though we make it clear that work on a Rust codebase is ~~expected~~ required, and familiarity with generalized concepts like static/dynamic dispatch are important. We hire young Rust devs all the time.
I don't mean saying something like "our tech stack is in Rust." More like "3-5 years experience in Rust" under the job requirements.
It's not hard to learn a new language or train it in good engineers. If you're limiting your candidate pool based on particular language experience you are severely limiting the growth potential of the business. That's just been my experience.
And if your reasoning is something like, "Rust is hard and it's going to take N weeks to onboard a dev to contribute and we can't afford that" then it's an even bigger red flag about the engineering capacity of the business and state of development.
I think i addressed this in my edit. We are not doing this.
I learned Rust (and C++!) at my current job, with Java being the only statically typed language i knew before that.
Unless you have reason to believe that a significant fraction of otherwise smart and capable static-language programmers will just never be able to learn Rust. I have no idea if that is true or not, and it would be interesting if it was.
I believe i said exactly this. Specifically i said:
> We're hiring devs who want to use Rust.
Which seems clear to me. My edit also addresses new Rust devs. Our requirement is that you want to work in Rust. Which shouldn't be shocking or controversial.
But for Rust, looking for language experience might be the right choice since the learning curve is relatively steep and takes time. Unless, of course, the company is okay giving 2 months to just learn.
Yea, this is our opinion. Our options are limited due to the smaller talent pool, so the time it takes for devs to "spin up" is something we consider. We can't hire a full team of devs who take 2 months to spin up. We can, maybe, do 5 young devs and 5 seasoned devs.
I've personally found that devs who have experience with C++ are almost a direct shoe-in. They know all the concepts and the transition seems easy, especially since they're already interested in Rust. Having hired a few dynamic language folks though, they have a higher barrier to entry with Rust. A lot more concepts to learn.
The "hard" parts of Rust are the usage of lifetimes in generic heavy code (especially combined with function traits in order to be generic over closures), object pinning, and soundly operating in unsafe. Those are advanced topics to be sure, but they are not something you would expose a newbie to in the early days of onboarding.
