There really is a strange dichotomy. Plenty of Rust developers have trouble finding jobs and apparently companies have trouble finding Rust developers.
Just take a look at https://rustjobs.dev/. Most of them are well paid remote jobs, but they are asking for +3 years of "professional experience" with rust, "with a proven track record of building and deploying production-quality code", and more. Hell, iirc, i saw one asking for proof of contributions to the rust repo (eg, being a core maintainer).
edit: to be fair, i saw one position a while ago asking to be willing to learn rust
Isn’t this a fairly well-known phenomenon though?
- new language makes waves. The people who picked it up early do some impressive stuff.
- early early adopter companies either snap them, or internally make the choice to learn it too. In turn, they do some stuff with it.
- gets a reputation for being the hot new thing. Other companies “want in on it”- they want to be able to do the fancy cool things the other places did, but they don’t have the patience, time or culture to grow it themselves so they aim to hire out seniors and everyone with lots of prior experience. <——- many orgs are here.
- proliferates enough that it’s well and truly mainstream. Also known as the “hire 1000 Java devs and throw bodies at stuff” stage of hiring and availability. Python, Node, Java, PHP, etc are here.
Asking for proof of contribution to the Rust repo is insane though.
- Must have 5 years of Rust and 8 years of embedded experince
or
- Must have 5 years of Rust snd 10 years of writing SQL engines.
or
- Must have 2 years Rust experience and 5 years with Linux kernel development.
etc...
If you are looking to hire someone with specific domain experience, it makes more sense to compromise on the Rust language side of things. A developer can learn Rust on the job, but it is harder to learn to write a production SQL engine on the job. But that means you aren't hiring Rust devs.
Developers who just specialize in Rust are behind their peers who are domain experts when it comes to looking for a job.
IMO that means Rust will "win" not when a bunch of undifferentiated developers learn Rust, but when the domain experts learn Rust. e.g. Kernel maintainers.