[pcthrowaway]

The idea that people might spend 2 months learning rust and become as productive in other languages is frankly unbelievable to me. If they're coming from any background other than C/C++ I'm suspicious that people can even become as productive in general (which is fine, reduced productivity is in my mind one of the trade-offs you make for memory safety and increased performance when choosing Rust)

But this is Google, and the people doing self-assessments were likely influenced by the context of operating in cut-throat bureaucracy where self-aggrandisement is a requisite to career progression within the org.

Whether or not this survey was tied to any performance evaluation (and from the article it's not even clear that it wasn't) the relevant thing is whether the employees knew without a doubt that they weren't going to be compared against one another based on their self-assessment

edit: I'm curious if the people downvoting disagree with my assertion that the survey methodology is flawed, or the assertion that it's unlikely to become as competent in rust in 2 months as you would be in languages you have years of experience with.

[joshka]

>The idea that people might spend 2 months learning rust and become as productive in other languages is frankly unbelievable to me.

Upvoted even though I anecdotally disagree with your perspective based on personal experience. I wrote my first line of rust in March this year (just as a hobby), and now am one of the maintainers of a popular TUI framework (Ratatui). I feel just as productive or more than any of the previous languages I've written code in (over the last 30 something years).

[pcthrowaway]

Interesting. I've been learning/using rust for work for the last 3 months.

I'm at the point now where I'm productive (took me over a month to even get to that point), but I still feel incredibly slow compared to Typescript. The compilation time doesn't help.

Anyway, thanks for the perspective.

I'm still skeptical that the survey reflects honest feedback given Google's culture, but perhaps I'm just biased from how long it's been taking myself and the rest of the team to achieve a higher level of productivity

[joshka]

Probably one of the biggest speed ups to your inner loop writing / running code is to use something like https://github.com/Canop/bacon/. I used a combination of the docs and GPT chats to increase my learning speed a lot.