I asked the moderator of the Who's Hiring thread on r/rust how to get the same per release thread going here and they recommended I ask the Discourse mods here.
Mods, can we set up a similar per release Who's Hiring thread here as well?
If you want to know why I ask for this, it's for my mental health. More specifically, I only use Reddit for r/rust and want to leave the site and block it in the browser. Mental health because, in order to disallow dopamine doom scrolling, I don't want to come up with uBlock Origin rules to allow myself reading/writing only one subreddit (r/rust). It's simpler to block the host like I do together with other social media sites.
This also endorses Reddit, a company we don't really want to endorse anymore.
We shouldn't force users to go to a platform that can be bad for their mental health, as explained by OP.
So far, r/rust's thread had the de-facto official Who's Hiring thread. It would be important to get an actually official Who's Hiring thread instead, in order to not depend on companies like Reddit for this.
I'd say there's a significant difference between mentioning where "who's hiring" threads exist on the internet vs. hosting our own one, and I thus don't see doing one but not the other as an contraction at all.
And there's also a difference between saying there's no "who's hiring" thread on official platforms and "forcing users to use reddit", and I don’t think we do the latter: Of course any other unofficial site/community besides r/rust is allowed to (and some possibly even do) have their own places to post job offers.
In fact, it looks like the stickied post you mentioned also links to jobs listed on stackoverflow. I do agree however that only linking the reddit thread – as TWIR seems to be doing it – makes the reddit thread gain some "de-facto official" vibes. I'm not personally very familiar with good sources for job offers in Rust either. Maybe there are more good alternatives we could link to, in order to avoid recommending only one?
If I understand our forum's rule of "don't post job offers" correctly, a meta-discussion about what alternative websites are good for finding (or posting) Rust job offers should be fine, and if people comes up with good additional ones we could consider listing more prominently, that could be an improvement.
If I understand this correctly and I'm allowed to argue for an exception, here goes:
It's a single, self-contained thread per release, same format as What’s everyone working on this week, just one thread every 6 weeks.
Random job posts would still be disallowed.
A well-defined template and rules for each job post would be followed.
If it's not up for debate, then I apologize.
I didn't know there are (Rust) job posts on StackOverflow, but that's unsurprising as I seldom open StackOverflow. I'll check it out.
I have seen companies post jobs in git repositories (e.g. GitHub). So maybe as something by and for developers, and a way to filter out recruiter spam, as a community we could maintain a per release GitHub issue inspired by Awesome Rust.
I don’t see anything wrong with hypothetically discussing what would be involved in this, but of course this might be relatively pointless in case there are zero plans to change the rules anyways.
FYI, I’m myself still relatively new to the moderation role and I don’t know the whole story why we don’t have job offers here. Maybe it has to do with the moderation effort such threads could imply that no-one wants to spend; maybe it’s about the implications in image of having job offers on an “official” Rust website, without much quality control; maybe it’s motivated by the situation in the past where job offers would have each taken their own topic, which is obviously a bit too much for the forum, where a dedicated topic might help.
I’d appreciate feedback on this thread from others more knowledgeable, as I do think it’s fair to be transparent about, at least roughly, the reasons why a rule like this is in place; on that note it would probably also be good to get the current rule mirrored into one more place than besides the stickied post; i.e. the FAQ-page for example.
Going through the back-links on the stickied thread, there’s also this thread discussing the topic of job offers that may be of interest. It also features a hint of a reason behind the rule in the statement:
To get more specific, an Official Rust Job Board, if it ever comes to be, probably won't be a stickied topic like "what's everyone working on this week." That approach is unworkable.
It's natural that a job posting will, sometimes, prompt a discussion. Maybe the company making the offer did something bad, or maybe there's just something unclear about the ad copy.
If we allow the discussion to happen, then the who's hiring thread becomes a mess. Anyone who posts a new ad will be posting it after all the discussion (if the discussion keeps going, it'll show up in the middle of it). This is because mega-threads like that one aren't how Discourse is designed to be used. A Discourse Topic is supposed to tell a single, non-fiction story that you read from start to finish. It doesn't matter for "what are you working on," since those posts usually link to another website where follow-up discussion can happen instead. It also isn't as much of a problem for /r/rust, since Reddit is intentionally designed to handle semi-off-topic tangents.
The other option is that we don't allow people to discuss the job offers. However, if the mods won't let the community vet the job offers, then we need to do it ourselves, and we don't have enough people to do that. This is also one of the reasons given for TWiR abandoning their job ads section.
So, if we try to fit it into Discourse's design intent, then each job ad should get its own thread. That's logical: if you're considering a job offer, then you probably want to know what everyone else here has to say about it. But this also makes job ads more prominent than we want, giving them equal billing with the Q/A and engineering-related discussion that is supposed to be this site's bread-and-butter.
Figuring out what, if anything, to do instead? That's been a topic we've been discussing on and off for awhile, but have not come to a consensus on. Hence, the answer we've been giving: there are no plans at this time to add a whos hiring thread to any official Rust venues.
I think a thread per job makes sense. TuxDigital (formerly Destination Linux) Network has a category for jobs (which happens to be dead): Job Board - TuxDigital Forum. Not sure if there would be a way to de-emphasize them on the latest view.
That's a structural limitation which is a problem. Is there a report/disapprove button on each comment that is maybe hidden from regular users like myself?
Discussions on each job message happen when it breaks rules or regular users disapprove of the position or industry, and that happened very rarely on reddit and isn't essential.
A separate jobs.rust-lang.org would work, but that requires more moderators, and I wonder if the foundation has plans to employ moderators like the orange site does.
I think it would be the moderators team not the foundation that would have to take care of such a site.
At the point where there's a separate site for job postings like jobs.rust-lang.org, I'd consider doing it myself if I were you (and can't get the consent of the moderator team). A static site generator like Zola hosted on GH Pages with a template Markdown file companies can use to create their own job postings via PRs sounds to me like it could be set up in a day or two[1]. Of course you'd need to do the vetting yourself (or add co-maintainers that can approve PRs in your repo), but I don't see why such a site could not replace the link in the "Jobs" section of TWiR.
The rustjobs.dev org doesn't seem to use GitHub for the content from what I can see. My developer centric view is that it should be contained and managed in a GitHub repository.
To be honest, I don't know what I'm doing, but I took an initiative to create the org and invite those with more experience. I'm just a random Rust developer who is looking for a permanent home for Rust job posts that isn't constrained by Discourse or Lemmy limitations.
I guess we'll see if I'm naive or other developers will join the org and help turn it into something like Awesome Rust but for jobs.
I like the existing Who's Hiring template and would suggest to base the ticket template on it and then see if we can attract posts. I think the ability to close and reopen a ticket is valuable for tracking vacations.
I chose GitHub as a way to avoid companies having to use an unfamiliar git hosting service and unnecessarily limit ourselves. I don't use GitHub for my code, but GitHub is the primary social network for developers, which I can compromise on.
Basic structure with an adaptation of the existing r/rust Who's Hiring thread as issue template configured. Now waiting for more volunteers to help improve and run the org. It's not my personal project, just something I'd like to exist and welcome interested crustaceans. I'm thinking how best to approach which (all? only promient devs?) members can be invited as org owners so that I'm not the bus factor of 1.