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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Maintenance is where Rust really shines and makes up for it's initial learning curve and slightly slower writing speed. In terms of hiring I can't imagine it being a problem either. There are lots of developers who would jump at the chance to work with Rust, and comparatively few Rust jobs (especially ones that don't involve working with cryptocurrency).

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There are lots of people curious about coding Rust in production, and most of them consider themselves competent to write it. But that is not what you look for when hiring. Or, it shouldn't be.

I would say that curiosity about languages in general is one item that you should look for in candidates. Not the only one of course but curious people do tend to learn and adapt well.

For an analogy, I wouldn't hire a pilot that isn't interested in other planes than what's on their license. What if I want to operate some new models?

Unless I'm looking for someone for a truly specialised role, I would avoid people that stick to only one thing for their entire careers.

Curiosity is a quality, but not a qualification.

For hiring, what you should look for, first and foremost, is competence. Curiosity is not a substitute.

Curiosity is a decent indicator one of the many types of competence that you ought to be assessing: the ability to learn new skills and deal with problems that are outside of their current skill set. Which for most software jobs is rather key skill.

As long as either:

- they’re senior level in another language and have at least one non-trivia project in Rust (need not be professional)

- Applying for a junior position and thus will have access to mentorship

I don’t see what the problem is. Rust isn’t Haskell: while there’s a few new things, most imperative programming experience will translate.

I don’t believe Rust is that good at maintainability - refactors are safe, but they are very tedious, which is inherent to its low-level nature. In a managed language if a refactor causes different lifetimes/ownership model, the runtime will automatically handle it. In Rust you will have to fight the borrow checker for it.

Don’t get me wrong, Rust is a really great language, but if the domain doesn’t require low-level programming, don’t choose a low-level lang, in my opinion.

Can anyone speculate why there's so much crypto using Rust as opposed to everybody else? I am afraid crypto will end up giving Rust a bad name.

There seem to be a lot of long running Rust job openings in the cryptocurrency space. Maybe those positions are always open because nobody wants to work there? You asked for speculation :)

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