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Comment by adkadskhj | Hacker News Reader

This statement is so odd. So we should hire to bring on people who want to work in PHP, and then force them to use Rust?

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.

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What I mean is that hiring for particular languages is a massive red flag to me in job listings.

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 don't mean saying something like "our tech stack is in Rust." More like "3-5 years experience in Rust" under the job requirements.

I think i addressed this in my edit. We are not doing this.

You should hire people who know a statically typed language and prepared to learn Rust.

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.

> You should hire people who know a statically typed language and prepared to learn Rust.

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.

What you said was (my emphasis):

> My shop uses Rust, and all our hires are aimed at Rust, and it's still not easy - there's not a ton of people who know Rust.

Which rather implies that you are trying to hire people who already know Rust. You then asked rhetorically:

> So we should hire to bring on people who want to work in PHP, and then force them to use Rust?

Suggesting that you saw this as the only alternative to hiring people who already know Rust. I was pointing out a third possibility which i thought you had omitted.

So i wouldn't agree that this was exactly what you said. But, of course, i am very happy to hear that this is what you are doing!

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