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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Some great observations by Graydon here. And also in some ways unsatisfying, because he seems on a roll on some idea, but then he doesn't know the solution, and the proposal of hiring experts prompts nervous questions.

Who is going to find those experts? How do you prevent empire-building and fiefdoms affecting which experts are hired? How will the new people be aligned?

> a lot of people over the years have left the project, and a lot of the leaving has been on fairly sour terms. A lot of people feel regret and resentment about ever participating.

This happens a lot with projects. Though some of the odd vibes from Rust leadership lately are more concerning than some of the idiosyncrasies that have caused me to write off some other projects in the past. Hopefully they straighten that out a lot, before more damage is done.

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> Who is going to find those experts? How do you prevent empire-building and fiefdoms affecting which experts are hired? How will the new people be aligned?

You can hire an “Organizational Dynamics” consultant. Their job is to help create healthy organizational structures.

This doesn’t answer the question of who and how to make that hiring decision, but a good OD consultant will nip empire-building behavior in the bud. The decision becomes “is this person qualified to help with our sort of organization,” rather than, “will this person support my agenda,” which is an easier decision to make.

An OD consultant will also be able to recommend or provide conflict resolution strategies, training, and mediation services. Grayson mentioned that as a possible root cause, and that seems very probable, based on what I know of typical geek interpersonal failure modes.

> And also in some ways unsatisfying, because he seems on a roll on some idea, but then he doesn't know the solution, and the proposal of hiring experts prompts nervous questions.

It’s a typical "compiler nerd" (any nerd) response. You don’t know something so you think you can outsource it to someone who has the required skills.

Which is fine in a limited sense. But if the problem is political then you might get other problems if you outsource it too much.

I've put my own Rust adoption on hold for now. I think they'll ultimately be successful-enough, in one form or another (e.g., if a big tech co that invested big can't affect the solution well enough, they can always effectively fork). But there's already too much nonsense going on in the world, and there's more attractive things to be working on right now, than org dysfunction you can see coming from a mile away.

(PSA side note to any individuals/teams in a "stressful" project/org. Stress isn't only unpleasant and difficult; it's physiologically damaging you, and you can't perceive much of the damage until it's too late. And the kinds of stress that come from org dysfunction beyond your power to fix are IMHO worse than the usual startup kinds of problems that you can potentially overcome with creativity and smart/hard work. Push back on bad stress, decide when to walk away, and next time try not to go there in the first place.)

I feel this is a shortsighted reaction when most languages have had something like this happen, repeatedly even. C and C++ have had the exact same issues with utterly grinding down attempted contributors, public sniping between committee members, etc.

I'm not trying to minimize this because it deeply needs to be addressed, but using one language or another is a relative decision, and between Rust and C++ I still think C++ is more dysfunctional, Go doesn't really attempt to be a "community" led project in the first place, Java drama ended up in the Supreme Court, etc.

But the energy we could spend on, say, ramping up and migrating to Rust, at the moment, could instead be put into ramping up in doing something with LLM.

That's the example I personally have in mind, but other individuals and organizations can usually think of multiple options for investing their resources, what directions they could head towards, etc.

Rust and LLMs are very different domains... If you are writing systems software the choice is between Rust and C, not Rust and ChatGPT.

This comment gives me the impression of someone using Rust to follow a fad, not because it is something that is useful to them.

I guess many might've read it that way, so I'll try to clarify.

I can already do systems programming in C or C++. If I'm investing in Rust, to do systems programming in some ways better, then I want to restore confidence that it's not already becoming dysfunctional in leadership.

Fads come and go, some fad-followers hop jobs every 12-18 months (and really don't have to care much whether a fad pans out, because they'll just hop on the next one), but I'm trying to think strategically and longer-term about what I invest in.

Thanks for the clarification, though I do have to emphasize that a lot of Rust adopters are those who are adopting it as a replacement for a systems language, and saying you're switching from Rust to working on LLMs is a bit of a non-sequitur and not an actual choice for a lot of people who use Rust.

I think the reality is though that you can’t really get away from dysfunctional organization even falling back on other languages (or maybe you prefer the C++ flavor of organizational dysfunction), but I do think with Rust you see it a lot more in the public eye.

I think it's pretty astounding that people are actually deciding not to learn a language because of a governance issue that has manifested as a conference speaker being disrespected.

The rust leadership issues are just not things you have to think about as a rust developer. There isn't going to be a meaningful fork, there... just is nothing to worry about. The people who are invested in this sort of thing are discussing it, that does not have to be you.

That's not the only incident. And there's also patterns across decades of projects, sometimes even including some of the same lineage or influences, and we'd like to learn from the past.

An individual Rust developer probably doesn't care about any of that, absolutely correct.

But it can affect some Rust developers near-term in perceptible ways, and longer-term it will absolutely affect much more.

Org dysfunction is often how empires fall, getting twisted along the way, and sometimes why they fail to become empires in the first place.

Just about any language that I've paid attention to has had drama. Maybe there will be long term impact but, again, it's nothing that the average dev should be concerned with. In the same way that C++ drama over decades could maybe somewhat impact a company like Google that is massively invested in it, but otherwise everyone else is just... writing C++.

Everyone who buys into a platform is impacted by where that platform goes.

And where that platform goes is to a large extent determined by org dynamics (leadership, drama, etc.).

I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that dramatic events or small organizational issues (note that there are many rust teams that function fine) will drive platform direction.

Every other language has survived plenty of drama.

Survivor bias. Most languages have disappeared or become fringe.

And the ones that did survive have often been twisted, developed poorer communities than some others, etc.

Which languages have made it to the level of success that rust has achieved and then flamed out because of small organizational issues?

Elm seems like the best candidate?

Not sure Elm ever made it close to where Rust is. Of FAANG, Netflix is the only one where I don't think there's any Rust, just for example. Microsoft is shipping Rust in Windows. Linux supports one language other than C and it's Rust.

Elm was an interesting language but I don't think it ever saw anywhere near the same level of adoption by hobbyists nor companies.

I agree, though that might be where the survivorship bias comes in -- it seems like Elm's ideas have been massively successful and I would say are now the most common way to produce webapps. But people choose to take the ideas while discarding the language, and that's where I suspect community mismanagement was a large cause.

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