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Comment by devnullbrain | Hacker News Reader

This maps to my own experience in the UK. Every time I search for a C++ job, I inevitably end up discussing my fondness of Rust but inability to use it at work. The interviewer will typically reply mentioning discussions of using it for greenfield projects - but I know it won't result in me writing anything of substance.

2 years ago, seeing a somewhat applicable Rust job-description made me 90% certain it was about cryptocurrency fintech. Now, a few defence roles are creeping in, presumably due to the US government distancing itself from unsafe languages. Neither are fields I really want to work in. And what a shame it would be if such a great language was relegated to being an Ada alternative.

I try to keep on top of Rust, - it's the most likely candidate to put me out of a job - but it will be a long time before there are no more legacy C++ codebases. Being the COBOL guy of the future doesn't sound too bad.

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Being in the uk, we were fortunate enough to choose rust as a main language with my co-founder about two years ago. We chose it after trying it out for some toy projects, and with no real experience with it (but both of us having heavy experience of C++, C#, Python, Ruby, and having tested many others).

We chose it because it felt "right", giving us c++ performance, productivity when writing, and a feeling of cleanliness from its type system I had not experienced since ... Ocaml.

But what we did not expect was how great it was from a talent perspective. We started hiring at a time where lots of rust developers were being laid off crypto, and the caliber of candidates is just ... amazing. Rust devs enjoy working with the language, and you get a type of developer who likes producing good code, and is usually quite passionate about coding.

So, I understand rust jobs are not easy to get by, but being on the other side of the table, it's a wonderful talent magnet for our team, allowing us to hire great developers.

Apologies for the off-topic but I am currently in a job search. I'd rate myself below the guys and girls you hired but I am very enthusiastic working with Rust. You hiring?

Again, sorry. :( But I am not getting any networking opportunities lately and couldn't resist replying to your message.

There's a hiring thread: you might find that useful. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring The next one's coming out in a few days.

Already did, thank you, I am simply trying my luck at a direct connection. Sanctioned HR processes are a meat grinder.

I skim it, but I typically only see maybe 2-3 roles in my domain. And these days, maybe 1 is in the US and the other 2-3 are in the EU. Such a rough market.

The crypto bit is an interesting filter. Wether the developers you found are true believers, grifters in on the scam, or just mercenaries for hire welding crates, they can't not have an opinion on cryptocurrency so my question to you is how much of that do they bring to work? Are there coffee chats about Ayn Rand and politics or do they steer clear of any of that.

I think you have a very skewed view of what people interested in cryptocurrency are like.

> I think you have a very skewed view of what people interested in cryptocurrency are like.

Given that it's a heavenily gift for criminals (including those wishing to evade taxation on otherwise legit commercial activity) while leeching a good share of world's energy resources, I think he's excused.

I think it's a pretty accurate view of the average non-developer-crypto-enthusiast. I'm not sure how well it translates to the developer side.

Absolutely! It's a spectrum and people lie somewhere on it. I can't have a picture of the entirety of it (though I'd love to), but I can only go off my own experiences. I try and get as full a picture as I can, but it's unfortunately going to be skewed. yours is too. I'd love to hear which way your POV skews towards

It’s funny, I’ve been in crypto for a few years now and not once have I seen these grifters you talk about.

Also, you should maybe stop associating right wing crypto YouTubers with crypto developers. I would say most I know are left of central.

Never? The highest profile things in crypto are the scams, so you gotta be pretty laser-focused on your niche to not see them.

The highest profile things in crypto are Bitcoin ETFs which are institutionally run, so I guess you’re not wrong there

FTX seems pretty high profile to me.

I’m just a dev, and don’t hang around parties in the Bahamas. Like I said, I’ve never met a single person who’s a grifter.

Calling out FTX is like doing background checks on the company you work for’s VCs, their LPs and then their associates. Nothing to do with crypto on the ground

if you can't see the grifters, you're the mark

You’re a Java developer and you’re calling me the mark?

You have seen no grifters in crypto and you're calling me a java developer?

Let's assume a normal distribution of humanity exists in crypto, ie, broadly, over all of humanity, there are good people and bad people, so we would expect there to be good and bad people in crypto, as, while there are some self-selecting aspects to cryptocurrency enthusiasts or developers, there isn't a way to select for "only good people". This is true for every group of people. This is true of the police, true of the clergy, true of school teachers, true of software developers, politicians, etc.

So if you've never once seen them, either you're wilfully blinding yourself, or you haven't looked very hard. Now, whether or not grifters are overrepresented in the cryptocurrency community, the cryptocurrency developer community, or the right wing crypto YouTubers community, is an entirely separate question, which I made no claims about. Though I imagine North Korean crypto devs fall into a certain category.

But to claim they don't exist, because you've never seen one is questionable. I mean, that works for some things (eg unicorns and dragons), but I've also never seen eg the Vegas Sphere in person, but I'm fairly convinced it's a real thing that exists.

Nah, I don't claim they don't exist but I also claim that I've never met any - 99% of people I know in crypto are devs who chose to be there because of the ideals and challenges. From what I've seen in media, it's not the devs who are the scammers but the people up top - founders and sales people, which again I don't know many of that kind.

> Being the COBOL guy of the future doesn't sound too bad.

This is where I arrived for different reasons. It seems that Rust might become an important language, career-wise, so I learned it to the level of basic competency. In the course of doing that, I learned that I really hate Rust. Not on technical grounds, but I find the language itself unpleasant, and I dislike much of the tooling around the language (crates, etc.)

Rust wouldn't be the first language I've learned and dislike, but this time, I decided to just take a pass. Even if Rust becomes the predominant language, there will always be work in other languages. I'll be content with that.

I am not sure I can decipher from your comment what do you exactly find unpleasant in the language and the tooling?

Not OP but the syntax is off-puting for me, it's simply difficult to read.

I can parse and read all C/C++/TypeScript/Java/C# code with ease, it all makes sense and reads like poetry. Rust's syntax is just ugly, I have a visceral unpleasant feeling sort-of like when I have to read Perl code or (to a lesser degree) Objective-C.

You don't like the turbofish?

lifetime annotations seem to be the biggest yuck for most people, given it's the most un-C++ like syntax (and single-quotes are always balanced in most languages).

Single quotes are not balanced in GNU Octave or Lisps. I have never seen that as a critique of those.

I think they have more obvious syntax complaints (from the perspective of the C-syntax language developer), to be fair

That's what's always tripped me up learning VHDL. I still don't really like it.

I dislike the language's syntax. I dislike the crates concept, but that's a minor thing I probably shouldn't have mentioned.

You probably should not have because I'd immediately ask what is the alternative to crates. :D

Dependency management is a fact of life for most of us out there in the trenches. It cannot be escaped. We don't want to roll our own.

Sorry buddy, you're not allowed to dislike Rust on the internet. You will now be arrested by the internet police and banned.

Hope you're joking.

I did the same with golang. And too bad because it gets several things right that I’d like to use.

This is also true where I am in Australia. There are very few Rust jobs.

However, from the first two comments on the article :

"We use Rust at AWS (in my org) for every new project that would have previously been written in c++.

[–]rigmaroler 104 points 23 hours ago

Microsoft is the same. All new services running on VM-hosting nodes (i.e. domains where C# is explicitly not allowed) have to use Rust now. It's a top-down mandate.

There's also AI investment in converting C/C++ services to Rust, but I have a negative opinion on that investment"

So there is clearly a substantial amount of Rust being written in some places.

That's a kind of tier of employer that wouldn't even invite me to interview but you are right and I expect it will trickle down to my level in the long-run.

Don't beat yourself about it. My advice would be to get not too crazy about programming languages. Become proficient at one. Pick either C++ or Rust. Don't use HN as a source for making your next moves in career - it is very skewed. Rather use that energy to invest into building domain-specific knowledge - that will get you a lot further than being a programming language afficionado and a language lawyer. IMHO.

    Now, a few defence roles are creeping in, presumably due to the US government distancing itself from unsafe languages.

I know a few contractor teams that have moved to Rust not because of any federal pressure, but simply because they're small and hierarchical enough that 1-2 people who understand the benefits are able to set the development language.

They've been using safe languages like Ada and SPARK2014 for decades, and those are hardly unsafe. In fact they are safer and more mature than Rust and easier to learn IMHO.

Tried hiring people for Ada jobs, or finding open source stuff to use in it? Ada has failed to find a market even in the safety-critical niches it should be dominating. Heck, AdaCore is putting out more Rust stuff these days than Ada.

Yet, 7 companies are still in business selling Ada compilers, in a world where most devs refuse to pay for tools while expecting to be paid themselves.

And presumably they're all selling almost exclusively to the aerospace industry. There's like a dozen COBOL compiler vendors too. It's not indicative of the health of the language ecosystem.

Ada is used all over the place in high integrity computing, that is much more than aerospace.

Well, COBOL just got ISO COBOL 2023 out of the door, and both Visual COBOL and NetCOBOL, still offer a much better development experience than many FOSS toolchains.

Tell that to the largest company in the world, Nvidia that adopted SPARK for their high-integrity, high-security firmware.

I find Ada/SPARK2014 much easier to learn than Rust, and given its legacy, Ada programmers are of a higher quality for the high-integrity market than Rust at the moment. The fandom of Rust is a positive and attracts a lot of early adopters, but it still does not approach the portfolio of high-integrity software out there in Ada/SPARK2014.

I don't think spark is easier to learn. Ada probably is. Ada sacrifices some performance for some of the benefits rust gets for free though, and deallocating memory is unsafe in the versions I've played with. If forbidding free is the way we choose to eliminate use after free, then there are a lot more memory safe languages.

Only if you never moved beyond Ada83.

Controlled Types and SPARK provide the mechanisms to deallocate only when it is actually safe to do so.

Additionally unbounded collections, are just like graphs in Rust, they provide safe ways to managed dynamically sized collections, while hiding the unsafe code in implementation.

Why would staying on top of Rust put you out of a job?

They're saying they stay up to date with Rust, because it's the most likely to do away with C++ (their job), making sure they have relevant skills for if that happens.

The Rust language is what he's saying will put him out of a job, over tim as it replaces C (the language I'm guessing they work with professionally).

> Now, a few defence roles are creeping in, presumably due to the US government distancing itself from unsafe languages. Neither are fields I really want to work in.

Well, I am interested. Got any names?

Where are these C++ jobs? I've only seen Rust jobs :D

any role that requires performance. Games, embedded (though than might be more pure C), some backend dev work here and there, fintech/quant, many jobs that need to work with Linux in anyway.

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