[doteka]

My job is about 50% Rust, 40% Typescript, 10% Python with regards to language.

I would say Rust is the best day to day experience out of these 3 except for glitchy editor tooling and the long compile times. We have 1000 line services that take close to 10 minutes for a release build which is not ideal.

I would not necessarily suggest learning Rust to get a job though. We mostly stopped mentioning it in our job ads because we don’t want people applying for the “hip stack”. Usually, competent programmers with some basic understanding of how manual memory management works have no trouble picking it up as they go.

[mlindner]

> We mostly stopped mentioning it in our job ads because we don’t want people applying for the “hip stack”.

Can you elaborate on that? I'm maybe thinking of changing jobs soon and my #1 want is that I can commonly program in Rust as opposed to C. Why would you explicitly avoid mentioning Rust?

[doteka]

Yeah, sure. What I have seen a lot when hiring, is "magpie developers". These guys always have the hippest CV - if it's on the HN front page regularly, you bet it's on there.

We found in practice, these people tend not to be the best additions to a team. They are mostly interested in the new thing, and only for so long as it is new. When something new comes along, that's what they want to flock to. They'll be an endless source of rewrite suggestions, but tend to struggle when they need to actually dive in and solve complex problems with these tools.

In contrast, we are not really using Rust because it's the new thing on the block. We are using it because we write complex software that needs to run fast for the business to be viable, and Rust's got the best tradeoffs for that right now. If Rust wasn't a thing, we'd likely be using C++.

[doteka]

Also, a word of advice: the language in use should be one of the last things you're considering when looking for jobs. It really doesn't make a difference in your day-to-day happiness.

Instead, try to look for a team you fit in with, a manager you can trust, growth opportunities, and the chance to work on interesting projects that have impact. Case in point, one of my most enjoyable (and beneficial to my career) jobs was mostly Java 8 - and that's certainly near the bottom of my "good programming languages" list.

[athriren]

This is all very good advice.