Hi Rustaceans,
I need to convince non-technical stakeholders in our company that using Rust is viable.
The only concern is not being able to hire Rust programmers, this post is meant to convince them otherwise.
Please may I see responses from the community of those would like to program is Rust full time and remote.
Please list your experience level as a programmer and as a Rust programmer. Feel free to private message me if you don't want to go public.
Thank you for your patience.
Stewart
Picking technology stacks in a company is a very difficult thing, it's not just "is something viable". While I believe Rust is just getting started on its path of redefining all low level programming, succeeding where C++ didn't, I don't think it's this simple a question.
You need to frame the use case as to what Rust will do to help the company succeed, example: I recently did a PoC at work with a Rust library that would form the core of a suite of distributed SDK libraries for my company. We are in the process of validating the toolchains around Obj-C and all iOS and tvOS platforms, PHP, C# and possibly a few other languages. The point of this is to reduce the duplication of code across all of these shipping pieces of software, where it makes sense (BTW, everything works great so far).
If you really want to put Rust in play inside an organization, you should choose to do something with it that has clear benefits for the business that make it a good decision. Otherwise it comes down to just another language, and adding additional languages to a development organization should not be taken lightly. Rust is awesome, I firmly believe that it will gain significantly on the backend, and when WebAssembly matures, I think it will also do awesomely there. But the tooling is still young, and depending on how an Organization is going to use it, it could actually delay delivery because underlying libraries might need to be built to make the project successful.
Ah okay the technical risk I think I have a handle on.
This issue is more oriented in another direction. I've been on the job (CTO) over 1 month, it takes time for trust to build. So far things are edging closer towards them handing the technical reins to me. The company is new and so is the software (currently wordpress) but once the proof of concept comes through then we can start building a decent system. So all your points are valid, though in this scenario, trust is all that's needed.
A bit of feedback for near future people wondering similar questions on building a company where Rust programmers play a primary role:
A person private messaged me, highlighted people probably wouldn't contact me on a public forum, so please don't refer to the lack of public posts as a bad sign for Rust hires. After I edited the original post encouraging private messages I've had really high signal, much higher than I anticipated, though only a few people contacted me (count on one hand).
Hi! I run a consulting company that specializes in Rust, Integer 32. We're available for Rust work, including but not limited to building POCs, training (either remote or on site), and augmenting your team. We'd love to work with you if you'd like, and I hope our existence can help your cause! We're two people who have been doing Rust for a few years now, and each have about a decade of programming experience in other languages.
I also know of multiple people who have expressed their interest in a full time remote job doing Rust work to me, who I don't quite have the pipeline to justify hiring yet. I'm not personally worried about being able to hire people when the time comes!
Seems to me like I've encountered a few people now who would love to program in Rust, but can't find a job that justifies it. It's definitely a chicken and egg problem. And you may need to give some people new person 2 or 3 months to warmup and learn Rust. But if they are good C++ programmers or even programmers in other languages, they should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. Once you get past learning the memory safety features, it's a really nice and pretty easy to learn, well documented language.
My company is using Rust and have people we've had to turn down who are very interested in pogramming in Rust... in fact PM me if you want to talk to them.
You may also want to check out these guys:
They are teaching people Rust and getting a decent size group and may love to advertise jobs to the people they are getting.
Also check out:
https://rust.jobboard.io/
Good luck!