Spinup time of new engineers is like 6mo+, some devs who can churn out normal CRUD product work just fine in Rails or React ~never become productive with Rust, and hiring skilled Rust devs is just crazy hard (though maybe now that Blockchain/Solidity things have cooled there may be more supply).
Sidenote, we hire Rust at a small shop (~30 devs?). Ironically i've found it _easier_ to hire for Rust. You're totally not wrong, BUT, the quality of the candidates that apply is quite high in our experience. I suspect it's because we get a lot of passionate people. We don't have to weed out as many candidates.
With that said we don't aim for super senior devs. We're happy to hire a junior, etc. I care much more about the quality of the person than raw experience.
With that said traditional hiring avenues have not been fruitful for us. Word of mouth, Rust community job posting, etc have been most fruitful by far. Probably due to exactly what you said.
Being young and cheap is a good quality, I suppose. Experience is overrated.
The poster sounds like someone who invests in people and doesn't rule them out based on years of experience on their resume. From all of the "where are the seniors?" threads I've seen, the industry could use more of that.
One rule of thumb for me is that the more young a developer we hire is, proportionally we also need to hire an equally senior. Ie we don't want a huge amount of developers lacking experience.
However if you have enough senior developers to mentor the young ones? Seems a net win for all involved, to me at least.
(We were specifically looking for remote folks near EU time zones, maybe local in SF is harder?)