This is something I hear a lot from other founders.
Spinup time of new engineers is like 6mo+, some devs who can churn out normal CRUD product work just fine in Rails or React ~never become productive with Rust, and hiring skilled Rust devs is just crazy hard (though maybe now that Blockchain/Solidity things have cooled there may be more supply).
> and hiring skilled Rust devs is just crazy hard (though maybe now that Blockchain/Solidity things have cooled there may be more supply).
Sidenote, we hire Rust at a small shop (~30 devs?). Ironically i've found it _easier_ to hire for Rust. You're totally not wrong, BUT, the quality of the candidates that apply is quite high in our experience. I suspect it's because we get a lot of passionate people. We don't have to weed out as many candidates.
With that said we don't aim for super senior devs. We're happy to hire a junior, etc. I care much more about the quality of the person than raw experience.
With that said traditional hiring avenues have not been fruitful for us. Word of mouth, Rust community job posting, etc have been most fruitful by far. Probably due to exactly what you said.
> With that said we don't aim for super senior devs. We're happy to hire a junior, etc. I care much more about the quality of the person than raw experience.
Being young and cheap is a good quality, I suppose. Experience is overrated.
Well, hiring only super experienced people in a niche talent pool feels arbitrarily difficult. Young devs can be just as good, and we all need to build experience somehow.
One rule of thumb for me is that the more young a developer we hire is, proportionally we also need to hire an equally senior. Ie we don't want a huge amount of developers lacking experience.
However if you have enough senior developers to mentor the young ones? Seems a net win for all involved, to me at least.
Lets be happy when someone says they're hiring juniors.
The poster sounds like someone who invests in people and doesn't rule them out based on years of experience on their resume. From all of the "where are the seniors?" threads I've seen, the industry could use more of that.
> Being young and cheap is a good quality, I suppose. Experience is overrated
It's "overrated" until it isn't. And then you learn very, very expensive mistakes. Unfortunately it takes experience to learn why this viewpoint is nothing more than hubris.
N = 1, but at startup scale we have definitely not had a hard time hiring skilled Rust devs. Just go on /r/rust and advertise your (non-crypto) job and get a lot of inbound.
(We were specifically looking for remote folks near EU time zones, maybe local in SF is harder?)
6mo+ is spot on. This is true for most dev work that deviates from the CRUD path. Like gaming, simulation, robotics. We might as well use the time to train them in Rust too.
Spinup time of new engineers is like 6mo+, some devs who can churn out normal CRUD product work just fine in Rails or React ~never become productive with Rust, and hiring skilled Rust devs is just crazy hard (though maybe now that Blockchain/Solidity things have cooled there may be more supply).