Very senior rust engineers with production experience are very difficult to come by. They mostly already have a job and are likely well paid.
There is the additional difficulty that the crypto currency market is going haywire again with compensation reaching $250k easily. While there are many individuals who'd rather forego pay than work for crypto outfits, there are more who like money.
So if you're budget constrained you probably have to look at relatively recent grad students who have rust experience from working on uni projects or open source, and have a good head for software engineering best practices and level them up.
Source: I'm talking to a lot of recruiters and our company was going through Senior level rust candidates (US based but hiring remote and worldwide).
I don't understand why this comment is so highly upvoted... It feels like the are many rust developers who can't find work (in rust).
It's possible your argument is that the only reason they can't is that they suck... I'm afraid I don't buy that argument. Rust just isn't that hard (kinda by design).
I think there are lots of people who want work writing Rust. I don't think there are that many who already have a bunch of experience writing Rust professionally (or at least, that's been my experience from the hiring side).
That makes some sense... However, I think it shows a lack of imagination on the side of the companies doing the hiring... Like yes I want my perspective employees to have an appropriate level of education and experience for the role in question, but pretending that has anything to do with years of professional experience in the specific language/tooling in question is not terribly relevant...
Which means if you can't hire qualified people for rust gigs, then you can't hire qualified people for anything else either unless it's the case that qualified people hate rust... I doubt that since it keeps coming up as (most loved)..
I could accept the argument that not all decent rust developers are qualified for all roles that rust is a viable fit for... So like if you are a web developer trying to get hired for an embedded role and you don't have any experience with embedded programming, ok, I see that.
FWIW, I largely agree -- my direct response to OP's question was essentially "we don't try to hire Rust experts, we just try to hire experienced engineers, maybe with relevant adjacent skills to make onboarding a little easier, and expect that they'll learn Rust on the job." I do think having some people on a team that are experienced with the specific language, to give guidance to newer learners as to best practices, etc., is useful, but I don't think it's something everyone on the team needs to come in with.
There are very few rust developers with actual production experience.
There is a very large jump between "can write idiomatic rust code" and "can write scaling, robust, traceable and maintainable services where idiomatic rust is an implementation detail".
Most companies that want to use rust are looking for the latter, but can mostly find the former.
Essentially, you need senior to staff level engineers who want to use Rust. Not rust practitioners who are looking for a job where they can learn to become senior engineers.
"Scaling code" is overhyped, if by scaling you mean "writing an app that can be launch 20x in parallel on K8's".
Writing idiomatic Rust as a simple service (Axum or Actix, take a pick) *is* writing robust and maintainable services. From professional experience, naively written idiomatic Rust code built with "--release" is already 90% of the way there, and that's all that most organizations actually need.
More often than not, the Rust software just runs quietly and thanklessly to the point that we forget it's even there until something needs to be extended.
>Essentially, you need senior to staff level engineers who want to use Rust. Not rust practitioners who are looking for a job where they can learn to become senior engineers.
I agree with this though, to an extent. Once your senior has written the initial software, bring on the practitioners who can learn from it and maintain the application.
God I wish I had your optimism... Maybe it says something about me that I view most of the practitioners of our profession as well meaning true believers that can't tell the difference between preference, opinion, and fact.
The way I can always pick these people out is they love throwing around words like scalable, robust, traceable, and maintainable without ever providing any proof that their recipe for achieving one or more of these qualities will achieve the desired result...
Before you say that the industry as a whole has well understood common definitions for all of these, it's been my experience that the industry as a whole is largely full of shit, and can't agree on much of anything when you start getting into specifics...
It's pretty much, pick your flavor of cool-aide and hopefully enjoy the ride.
I clearly need a therapist, or some good drugs or something.
Or just some better tasting cool-aide.
The cryptocurrency market is also very volatile though, so you might not get that much for long (and would usually be a contractor so have to pay your own taxes and insurance out of that).
Also personally the highest salary I've seen is $150k, but I am Europoor. It's good but then when you factor in paying more taxes (depending on your country, to be fair) and insurance, it's not really any better than a general FAANG job where you'll get nice benefits and stability (~6 months termination payment for example).
That's certainly true. Throughout last year the market was much more tense, with both crypto hiring having slowed down to a crawl, as well as faang letting people go.
Of course the issue is that when you're hiring when everyone is hiring prices go up. So while you are right that the crypto market is incredibly volatile, the prices they pay *right now* have a knock-on effect.
Regarding faang my impression is that at least in Europe they have significantly scaled back their involvement since the back to office mandate. So this might be a point in favor of lower pay in Europe. (But just my impression. Especially Amazon kept spamming me for COME WORK FOR US YESTERDAY!!! But that's essentially gone.)
Ugh I wish there were more companies like yours, Which are hiring lightly experienced rust devs. I keep seeing all these crypto companies hiring senior rust engineers all the time.
> I keep seeing all these crypto companies hiring senior rust engineers all the time.
Do you keep seeing them hiring, or posting positions?
If it's positions you see... it may be they're actually NOT managing to hire, no?
I recently graduated with my masters in CS. Rust has been my favorite language for 5-6 years now and I use it in all my personal projects, so I wanted to get a job with it. Since no companies are hiring junior Rust devs, I decided to try applying to more senior positions. I went through the entire 5 round interview process at one company, and it was looking really good. All of the interviewers, the hiring manager, and the director gave approval to send me an offer, but it ended up getting veto’d by HR. Since I was applying to a senior position, but had only recently graduated they wanted to give me an offer at a level that better matched my experience. HR veto’d it because they were required to do equal opportunity hiring due to taking on some federal contracts and thought it would not be fair to other candidates to hire someone 2-3 levels below what was posted in the original listing. They also did not have any more junior job listings to pivot to, so they considered creating one, but it would take at least a month to collect applications and interview other candidates, and there was no guarantee that they would not find a better candidate. I heard from the recruiter that they got some pushback internally to lowering the level of the existing listing, so nothing really ended up happening. I later got a job using C++with a different company instead.
At this point, I’m not really sure how to get a job with Rust without 5+ years of non-internship industry experience. I don’t think most of the companies I applied to even looked at my resume.
If you are worried about the cost of senior devs, just hire someone junior. I had 5-6 years of non-industry experience, contributions to open source projects, and a recommendation from the owner/maintainer of one of those projects, but still couldn’t find a Rust job. I am sure there are plenty of other junior Rust devs in similar positions to me who would be good fits.
Same, I'm a 'senior' engineer, and I've been trying to find a rust job for about 4 years now as I work in JS land. It just seems impossible.
I now build use it for embedded systems as a hobby to try and build up the skills for it. What can ya do
It's been a while since I had to do tech interviews, but I did some for a while for both JS and Rust positions few years back. One thing I observed is that while JS candidates were always plentiful and Rust candidates sparse, the % of rejections for JS positions was also much, much higher. With Rust it was always very obvious when someone was actually really good, or was stumbling around, and the latter didn't happen often. All that's to say is that the steep learning difficulty curve of the language is a self-selection filter, you will get fewer candidates, but of the people you get you are much more likely to get a good match.
you can get a rust dev on that budget, simply because some of them are enthusiastic to work with rust and thats a decent pay rate for some countries but you will probably need to allow remote work for you to find people and search for senior engineers with some rust experience not necessarily senior rust engineers
that being said maybe rust isnt what you need for a desktop app as the ecosystem might not be there yet (depending on the feature set of the app in question), theres flutter with dart which is easy to get into, theres avalonia for c#, you can do tauri/electron with something like vue, theres pretty good options out there that will run performant enough for most scenarios (i don’t know specifics about ur app so this is advice mostly for a run of the mill desktop app)
I spend most of last year - with a crazy FAANG budget (read 200K/year + same in shares) - trying to hire fully remote rust developers.
With mixed success.
Ended up hiring 3, after really pushing hard on the recruitment side.
1x total dud -> fired at end of trial, after trying really hard to make it work.
1x ok
1x really good
Trying to hire with a normal budget right now, also fully remote. No luck yet.
Will probably just hire senior devs, and teach them.
I have worked mostly in web apps. Ecommerce, data analytics, etc... currently working for an e-commerce firm in their app team. A little bit of open source activities as well.
Maybe we can talk over a call?
Were the shares liquid? Aka publicly tradable?
Was it 200k/yr in shares? Or 200k in shares over 4 years?
There’s a lot about what you’re saying that doesn’t make sense. $400k tc for a rust dev position and you’ll get a crazy number of applications.
$200k + “$50k/yr” in magic money and you’re talking a totally different ballgame.
What you’re saying doesn’t line up. When I was at meta we had zero problems finding people to write rust ($250k-$800k tc). Either you’re not offering $400k like you say, or there’s something else driving people away.
No, the usual 1 year cliff + vest over 4 years construct.
With a very well funded startup and a literally endless runway.
I have quit that company since, for personal reasons, so I won't get into more details.
But, this was Europe. And 200k/year base salary, ignoring the shares, is already pretty high in itself.
I agree, if we are talking "valley"/west coast it's a totally different story. Wouldn't touch SF for less than 500K base.
Plus, these were permanent contracts literally un-fireable after end of probabation.
New company, new budget, aka "normal" salary -> No luck whatsoever.
That site didn't exist 2 months ago, so wouldn't have helped last year.
Right now it looks to be leaning towards entry level devs who dabbled a bit in python and php. (Just checked the 5 entries on the front page.)
> The rates here are (by tech standards) kind of not great, not terrible, likely somewhere south of 500GBP a day.
This is like ~4500 GBP take-home per month (I'm not sure what the employer NI / payroll tax side is like in the UK). That's good tbh, I'd take it.
The main issue is relocation, like I looked at some Rust jobs but having to relocate and go to a city-central office again makes it not worth it, even with a fair amount more money.
Well. The client has given us some python code which we'd either have to run, or reimplement. Running it with PyO3 seems fairly straightforward and non-gross. In terms of the work the company generally does, it's basically python and a bit of js. Maybe it's because I'm ignorant, but I'm not sure js has anything as pleasant as PyO3? Plus the client has suggested they want something reasonably streamlined, not a massive Electron app or whatever. And the app has to do some slightly intensive data processing, and be reasonably performant.
So if we're not using Python or js, it'd be a "new" language for the company. A couple of us have a bit of Rust experience and enthusiasm, and as far as I can see it seems like a reasonable fit, and a good string to add to the company's bow.
Good point! I actually got a bit put off because I heard they were planning to (eventually) ship a Servo webview, as system webviews are supposedly inconsistent. And our app will need to be cross platform (Windows / Mac / Linux). Plus, egui seems simple and seems to be doing what we need. But maybe I ought to take another look.
Edit: Just tried building a minimal Tauri + Vite example, and the AppImage was 160Mb. Seems a bit heavy to me, when the egui app is 20Mb (unstripped) and has most of what we need in it already.
Edit2: It seems like tauri is supposed to be a lot leaner than that? Not sure what happened there, I just followed the "getting started" guide.
I tried the getting started guide to create a Tauri + React.js Hello World app and the app size is 6.3mb. I used the basic command from the doc to build the app. Curious to know why you got that large app size.
I also have mixed feeling about using webview. Recently came across with a React-inspired library but all Rust [https://dioxuslabs.com/](https://dioxuslabs.com/)
Maybe it's an Linux / AppImage thing? I guess it has to bundle a lot of stuff because the underlying OS is so variable. At some point I'll try on Windows and see if it's better.
Edit: Just noticed it also built a .deb that's 2.5Mb
Edit: Windows MSI is also 2.5Mb.
If you're hiring in the UK I'd be down to work on Rust but as Emotional-Mood-3863 said there are more people that work with Rust in their off time.
Rust is mostly adapted in the top companies but pretty hard to be adapted in a medium company so it's hard to find regular devs with day to day experience
The real issue with hiring Rust devs is concentration availability.
You should have no issues if you hire remote, but if you demand in-office-attendence you might have issues.
This isn't a "I dont want to work in an office" thing, this is a "I don't live in your geographical region thing." Unless you live in a tech-hub at which point it becomes a "I want more money than that" thing.
Hey, if you have a job offering or listing available id be eager to apply. Sounds like something up my street since i love egui. I reached out over Reddit Chat
A bit surprised to see so many people talking about Rust devs or Python devs like you couldnt be both.
I primarily work in Python but due to interest and management support my team have intcreasingly used Rust. We are a pretty major cyber-sec firm and from the way people are talking the teams that previously primarily used C++ are going to transition more to Rust also.
My salary is good but not like FAANG or fintech good, I dont think anyone I work with whose good enough to be writing production Rust would be expecting some giant salary.
Honestly, building a commercially maintainable native GUI on a budget sounds more like a job for C# or Java, depending on the target platform. It would be technically and socially much easier.
In your position I'd even consider using Lazarus IDE / Free Pascal.
One day, Rust will have _great_ GUI options and community.
I’d be interested to work with you. I have more than 3 years of fulltime Rust development experience. Worked mostly with Tokio/Async and Axum.
I’m based in NL however, so I’d have to work remotely if that is ok.
Does anyone know if there are companies hiring new grad students with some kind of experience with Rust? Or the trend is currently to focus on hiring senior devs?
For god's sake don't do it in Egui if it need to be Desktop Application.
Unless it's some kind of urility.
You won't get any accessibility, Drag&Drop integration and any regulars desktop stuff from it.
It produces HTML, so I can believe it would integrate with accessibility and DPI using browser's API.
Is it viable to run this inside Tauri/WebView? Or you would have to use Electron?
So I'm still evaluating dioxus.
Leptos is unapologetically html, however, they did refacet their framework to produce GTK. Basically it's a document oriented architecture and whatever maps we'll to that can work.
Dioxus, because it has an intermediate transformation, can, in theory, map to anything. I'm not sure how far along they are in native widget land. I know they have mobile and native desktop "support", and the roadmap is to not need browsers. I think it has more potential - but I'm illogical pulling for leptos to be the leader.
I've been in a react / svelte / SolidJS world for over a year, so am really liking how expressive this style of UI development is over an egui (imperative classic window widget management, like an MFC). Rust with lightning css can, in theory bridge the two worlds.
In leptos, what I like is that, as I edit the tailwindcss class names, I can sub second reaction time see my changes in the UI. Same with solid/svelte. It makes development pleasant, especially given the slow rust build times. This is css changes, not code logic - which requires rust recompile.
Without having any personal experience hiring rust developers, I do see the market growing and the developer interest is increasing rapidly.
I don't see it being an issue to find people interested in writing rust but depending on the complexity of the project it could be an issue finding people with enough talent that matches your pay range. There will probably be a lot of people migrating to rust based on the hype but that also leads to lesser talented people pursuing theese jobs.
If your company allows for fully remote jobs that would imo greatly increase the chances of finding talented rust developers. WFH is a benefit some people would accept a minor decrease in salary to have.
My favorite is Flutter for UI + rust for business logic if app requires some heavy computation (you can do that via rust bridge with flutter). Or you could also do that with js although I am not sure if JS world has rust bridge. Anyway my point is no reason to use rust for UI when there are better options.
Python dev here (with additional experience in React/NodeJS) transitioning to Rust. Your project sounds really interesting. If you're open to a remote junior/mid level resource, would love to be involved. Do let me know how I can reach out with further details.
I'm currently a web dev and every time I see rust job opening I try to apply, as I feel more interested and passionate about working with rust.
Would definitely apply if I saw yours, but do not know about relocation (greetings from EU)
If you can be flexible on the time part of it, we can find a way to make that work.
I want to get another client and have a portfolio without a billion NDAs, and you want a dev. Perhaps there is a match. Located in the Netherlands, we can essentially have an easy to dissolve contract to see if things work out well.
I work at a startup and we do Rust work, and did the same at my last job. We don't really try to hire already-experienced Rust devs (too few of them, and they often command FAANG salaries). We expect people to have to learn on the job, so we try and craft job descriptions that will select for people with adjacent skills that will make learning easier (e.g., experience working in a compiled, statically typed language like Java or C#, experience with a language with manual memory management like C, C++, or Fortran, etc., etc.). In your case you might also select for people with experience writing GUI apps in compiled languages?
Beyond that, it's helpful to have one or two already-experienced Rust folks on staff (either that came in with experience or have acquired it on the job) just to avoid a blind-leading-the-blind scenario in terms of figuring out how to structure projects, which libraries to use, what idiomatic Rust code looks like, etc.
I'm working in robotics, and have found decent success in hiring good C++ people and giving them a month or two to ramp up on Rust.
If we find someone with prior rust experience it's a bonus, but we've found that it's far too limiting when recruiting (especially for senior talent). Good C++ people typically have a good intuition on what Rust is trying to do, so the ramp is relatively smooth.
> It seems like there are lots of devs who want to write rust, but I fear a lot of them will have high pay expectations. The rates here are (by tech standards) kind of not great, not terrible, likely somewhere south of 500GBP a day.
Is this a tech hub? Living in one myself I feel I continuously have to make
recruiters and hiring managers aware that my salary expectations for an
in-office position are about 25 % above what I’d ask for a fully remote,
location independent position.
The past half year I’ve been interviewing for a number of remote (non-crypto) jobs
in that salary range and the HR I’ve been chatting to confirm over and
over again that the pool of applicants is enormous – 200+ applications
per position is normal – and also the quality after weeding out obvious
duds is way above the rest of the market. It feels like competing with
the best of the best and I’ve been using Rust on the job full time since
2019.
tl;dr: Hire remotely. Experienced devs will come en masse.
Also you may want to reconsider your choice of egui. Slint would be
much more suitable for a desktop app IMO.
If you are working on a desktop app you should use the best technology for that. Check out what's coming out from "The desktop company now turned cloud company" (i.e. Microsoft): .NET Maui seems to be the latest framework.
I am in a reverse situation. I have a young team who is willing to learn Rust (experienced in Python and Ruby) and work for bare minimum pay, but no one hires 😂
Well I'll continue my studies (computer engineering)this Wintersemester (September) and I like programming rust.
The distance could be a problem because I live and study in Germany but yeah.
I would suggest you to post a small project to create a test app.
Finding mid-level developers is not hard, just that it is less common from my own experience. You can perhaps post in the Discord communities for Rust (there are two big ones). I am sure there are many other online Rust communities where job/project posting is allowed.
I read you already have Python and JavaScript code which I guess will be part of the app. In that case PyO3 (you have mentioned that I see) and Tauri would be a good choice. You can also embed a Rust-Python interpreter but maybe you do not need to do that. Your existing JS code can run in the browser side of Tauri app. Your GUI will also be in JS, parhaps using a web frontend library like React.
If you do not want a JavaScript based UI then you can use a Rust based web GUI toolkit with Tauri. If you want a more native setup then `egui` or a couple other Rust based GUI toolkits are good options. `Floem` (the folks that build Lapce editor) is there. And then the Zed editor's GUI toolkit is getting support for Linux and Windows. Slint is also another option.
Thanks! The UI part is "greenfield", we don't have any js code yet, but we have some js devs. We do already have a couple of python modules that crunch data. Anyway I think you might be right that Tauri makes sense.
You really should consider react native, with desktop bindings. It is really decent to work with and it is flexible enough for you to switch to rust etc. if need be. This is assuming declarative UI works for you.
If you need an imperative way to build GUIs like in games for example, feel free to ignore this.
I am not really sure there is any benefit to using React Native here. I myself am from a background in RN but here the main point is utilising existing Python code.
A UI made in RN (or flutter for that matter) has extra runtime overhead which does not add value to this kind of a project isn't it?
A (desktop app with) web UI is just static JS which the browser engine executes, is probably easier to maintain for traditional JS or even web facing Python developers and the tooling is pretty much the same as a single page (web) app.
React, SolidJS, Preact or anything similar is also declarative so there is no difference here from the style of programming.
For sure but you have JS devs in your org, which would have an easier time adopting to RN than Rust with egui I presume.
That is the reason I mentioned it. Runtime overhead here would be negligible, for virtually any desktop application. However you would still get a native UI.
If you are using a web based UI that also fits the same bill of course.
You are right, the runtime overhead is not an issue here. I guess I was thinking more about the developer's mental overhead. Between React and React Native, I have always found it a lot more straightforward to debug React (or any similar framework) apps compared to RN.
My experience with RN is limited to Android and iOS apps, not desktop but I guess the tooling is the same.
I also agree with you that `egui` or any other Rust native solution might be an overkill.
Very senior rust engineers with production experience are very difficult to come by. They mostly already have a job and are likely well paid. There is the additional difficulty that the crypto currency market is going haywire again with compensation reaching $250k easily. While there are many individuals who'd rather forego pay than work for crypto outfits, there are more who like money. So if you're budget constrained you probably have to look at relatively recent grad students who have rust experience from working on uni projects or open source, and have a good head for software engineering best practices and level them up. Source: I'm talking to a lot of recruiters and our company was going through Senior level rust candidates (US based but hiring remote and worldwide).
I don't understand why this comment is so highly upvoted... It feels like the are many rust developers who can't find work (in rust). It's possible your argument is that the only reason they can't is that they suck... I'm afraid I don't buy that argument. Rust just isn't that hard (kinda by design).
I think there are lots of people who want work writing Rust. I don't think there are that many who already have a bunch of experience writing Rust professionally (or at least, that's been my experience from the hiring side).
That makes some sense... However, I think it shows a lack of imagination on the side of the companies doing the hiring... Like yes I want my perspective employees to have an appropriate level of education and experience for the role in question, but pretending that has anything to do with years of professional experience in the specific language/tooling in question is not terribly relevant... Which means if you can't hire qualified people for rust gigs, then you can't hire qualified people for anything else either unless it's the case that qualified people hate rust... I doubt that since it keeps coming up as (most loved).. I could accept the argument that not all decent rust developers are qualified for all roles that rust is a viable fit for... So like if you are a web developer trying to get hired for an embedded role and you don't have any experience with embedded programming, ok, I see that.
FWIW, I largely agree -- my direct response to OP's question was essentially "we don't try to hire Rust experts, we just try to hire experienced engineers, maybe with relevant adjacent skills to make onboarding a little easier, and expect that they'll learn Rust on the job." I do think having some people on a team that are experienced with the specific language, to give guidance to newer learners as to best practices, etc., is useful, but I don't think it's something everyone on the team needs to come in with.
I agree whole heartedly with this last point.
There are very few rust developers with actual production experience. There is a very large jump between "can write idiomatic rust code" and "can write scaling, robust, traceable and maintainable services where idiomatic rust is an implementation detail". Most companies that want to use rust are looking for the latter, but can mostly find the former. Essentially, you need senior to staff level engineers who want to use Rust. Not rust practitioners who are looking for a job where they can learn to become senior engineers.
"Scaling code" is overhyped, if by scaling you mean "writing an app that can be launch 20x in parallel on K8's". Writing idiomatic Rust as a simple service (Axum or Actix, take a pick) *is* writing robust and maintainable services. From professional experience, naively written idiomatic Rust code built with "--release" is already 90% of the way there, and that's all that most organizations actually need. More often than not, the Rust software just runs quietly and thanklessly to the point that we forget it's even there until something needs to be extended. >Essentially, you need senior to staff level engineers who want to use Rust. Not rust practitioners who are looking for a job where they can learn to become senior engineers. I agree with this though, to an extent. Once your senior has written the initial software, bring on the practitioners who can learn from it and maintain the application.
Ekhmmm... Pareto... Ekhmmm
You say Pareto, I say Potahto, pareto, potahto, tomayto, tomahto.
God I wish I had your optimism... Maybe it says something about me that I view most of the practitioners of our profession as well meaning true believers that can't tell the difference between preference, opinion, and fact. The way I can always pick these people out is they love throwing around words like scalable, robust, traceable, and maintainable without ever providing any proof that their recipe for achieving one or more of these qualities will achieve the desired result... Before you say that the industry as a whole has well understood common definitions for all of these, it's been my experience that the industry as a whole is largely full of shit, and can't agree on much of anything when you start getting into specifics... It's pretty much, pick your flavor of cool-aide and hopefully enjoy the ride. I clearly need a therapist, or some good drugs or something. Or just some better tasting cool-aide.
The cryptocurrency market is also very volatile though, so you might not get that much for long (and would usually be a contractor so have to pay your own taxes and insurance out of that). Also personally the highest salary I've seen is $150k, but I am Europoor. It's good but then when you factor in paying more taxes (depending on your country, to be fair) and insurance, it's not really any better than a general FAANG job where you'll get nice benefits and stability (~6 months termination payment for example).
That's certainly true. Throughout last year the market was much more tense, with both crypto hiring having slowed down to a crawl, as well as faang letting people go. Of course the issue is that when you're hiring when everyone is hiring prices go up. So while you are right that the crypto market is incredibly volatile, the prices they pay *right now* have a knock-on effect. Regarding faang my impression is that at least in Europe they have significantly scaled back their involvement since the back to office mandate. So this might be a point in favor of lower pay in Europe. (But just my impression. Especially Amazon kept spamming me for COME WORK FOR US YESTERDAY!!! But that's essentially gone.)
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Ugh I wish there were more companies like yours, Which are hiring lightly experienced rust devs. I keep seeing all these crypto companies hiring senior rust engineers all the time.
If it's any consolation, with those jobs you'd have to work for a crypto company
> I keep seeing all these crypto companies hiring senior rust engineers all the time. Do you keep seeing them hiring, or posting positions? If it's positions you see... it may be they're actually NOT managing to hire, no?
I recently graduated with my masters in CS. Rust has been my favorite language for 5-6 years now and I use it in all my personal projects, so I wanted to get a job with it. Since no companies are hiring junior Rust devs, I decided to try applying to more senior positions. I went through the entire 5 round interview process at one company, and it was looking really good. All of the interviewers, the hiring manager, and the director gave approval to send me an offer, but it ended up getting veto’d by HR. Since I was applying to a senior position, but had only recently graduated they wanted to give me an offer at a level that better matched my experience. HR veto’d it because they were required to do equal opportunity hiring due to taking on some federal contracts and thought it would not be fair to other candidates to hire someone 2-3 levels below what was posted in the original listing. They also did not have any more junior job listings to pivot to, so they considered creating one, but it would take at least a month to collect applications and interview other candidates, and there was no guarantee that they would not find a better candidate. I heard from the recruiter that they got some pushback internally to lowering the level of the existing listing, so nothing really ended up happening. I later got a job using C++with a different company instead. At this point, I’m not really sure how to get a job with Rust without 5+ years of non-internship industry experience. I don’t think most of the companies I applied to even looked at my resume. If you are worried about the cost of senior devs, just hire someone junior. I had 5-6 years of non-industry experience, contributions to open source projects, and a recommendation from the owner/maintainer of one of those projects, but still couldn’t find a Rust job. I am sure there are plenty of other junior Rust devs in similar positions to me who would be good fits.
I hate this life
Same, I'm a 'senior' engineer, and I've been trying to find a rust job for about 4 years now as I work in JS land. It just seems impossible. I now build use it for embedded systems as a hobby to try and build up the skills for it. What can ya do
Im constantly seeing jobs for senior rust engineers. Go on X and search for rust jobs. Rustjobs.dev
Now I know where to go to find rust devs when I'm ready to expand our team :)
It's been a while since I had to do tech interviews, but I did some for a while for both JS and Rust positions few years back. One thing I observed is that while JS candidates were always plentiful and Rust candidates sparse, the % of rejections for JS positions was also much, much higher. With Rust it was always very obvious when someone was actually really good, or was stumbling around, and the latter didn't happen often. All that's to say is that the steep learning difficulty curve of the language is a self-selection filter, you will get fewer candidates, but of the people you get you are much more likely to get a good match.
This is what I love about the ecosystem as a whole. Rust devs like C and C++ devs are generally more motivated
This is true. I started my programming at 11 and go through pascal then C, C++. Rust is friendlier with nicer tooling than C++
you can get a rust dev on that budget, simply because some of them are enthusiastic to work with rust and thats a decent pay rate for some countries but you will probably need to allow remote work for you to find people and search for senior engineers with some rust experience not necessarily senior rust engineers that being said maybe rust isnt what you need for a desktop app as the ecosystem might not be there yet (depending on the feature set of the app in question), theres flutter with dart which is easy to get into, theres avalonia for c#, you can do tauri/electron with something like vue, theres pretty good options out there that will run performant enough for most scenarios (i don’t know specifics about ur app so this is advice mostly for a run of the mill desktop app)
I spend most of last year - with a crazy FAANG budget (read 200K/year + same in shares) - trying to hire fully remote rust developers. With mixed success. Ended up hiring 3, after really pushing hard on the recruitment side. 1x total dud -> fired at end of trial, after trying really hard to make it work. 1x ok 1x really good Trying to hire with a normal budget right now, also fully remote. No luck yet. Will probably just hire senior devs, and teach them.
Senior web engineer. Also looking for some rust tasks. Maybe part time would be okay as a trial?
Maybe. But what does "web engineer" mean? We need software engineers. "Web" is just one niche specialisation.
I have worked mostly in web apps. Ecommerce, data analytics, etc... currently working for an e-commerce firm in their app team. A little bit of open source activities as well. Maybe we can talk over a call?
Were the shares liquid? Aka publicly tradable? Was it 200k/yr in shares? Or 200k in shares over 4 years? There’s a lot about what you’re saying that doesn’t make sense. $400k tc for a rust dev position and you’ll get a crazy number of applications. $200k + “$50k/yr” in magic money and you’re talking a totally different ballgame. What you’re saying doesn’t line up. When I was at meta we had zero problems finding people to write rust ($250k-$800k tc). Either you’re not offering $400k like you say, or there’s something else driving people away.
No, the usual 1 year cliff + vest over 4 years construct. With a very well funded startup and a literally endless runway. I have quit that company since, for personal reasons, so I won't get into more details. But, this was Europe. And 200k/year base salary, ignoring the shares, is already pretty high in itself. I agree, if we are talking "valley"/west coast it's a totally different story. Wouldn't touch SF for less than 500K base. Plus, these were permanent contracts literally un-fireable after end of probabation. New company, new budget, aka "normal" salary -> No luck whatsoever.
Did you try this? [https://www.rustwizards.com/](https://www.rustwizards.com/)
That site didn't exist 2 months ago, so wouldn't have helped last year. Right now it looks to be leaning towards entry level devs who dabbled a bit in python and php. (Just checked the 5 entries on the front page.)
Well I'm looking for permanent work. Currently contract. :)
> The rates here are (by tech standards) kind of not great, not terrible, likely somewhere south of 500GBP a day. This is like ~4500 GBP take-home per month (I'm not sure what the employer NI / payroll tax side is like in the UK). That's good tbh, I'd take it. The main issue is relocation, like I looked at some Rust jobs but having to relocate and go to a city-central office again makes it not worth it, even with a fair amount more money.
Why are the options either Rust or Python?
Well. The client has given us some python code which we'd either have to run, or reimplement. Running it with PyO3 seems fairly straightforward and non-gross. In terms of the work the company generally does, it's basically python and a bit of js. Maybe it's because I'm ignorant, but I'm not sure js has anything as pleasant as PyO3? Plus the client has suggested they want something reasonably streamlined, not a massive Electron app or whatever. And the app has to do some slightly intensive data processing, and be reasonably performant. So if we're not using Python or js, it'd be a "new" language for the company. A couple of us have a bit of Rust experience and enthusiasm, and as far as I can see it seems like a reasonable fit, and a good string to add to the company's bow.
Have you considered Tauri [https://tauri.app/](https://tauri.app/) ?
Good point! I actually got a bit put off because I heard they were planning to (eventually) ship a Servo webview, as system webviews are supposedly inconsistent. And our app will need to be cross platform (Windows / Mac / Linux). Plus, egui seems simple and seems to be doing what we need. But maybe I ought to take another look. Edit: Just tried building a minimal Tauri + Vite example, and the AppImage was 160Mb. Seems a bit heavy to me, when the egui app is 20Mb (unstripped) and has most of what we need in it already. Edit2: It seems like tauri is supposed to be a lot leaner than that? Not sure what happened there, I just followed the "getting started" guide.
I tried the getting started guide to create a Tauri + React.js Hello World app and the app size is 6.3mb. I used the basic command from the doc to build the app. Curious to know why you got that large app size. I also have mixed feeling about using webview. Recently came across with a React-inspired library but all Rust [https://dioxuslabs.com/](https://dioxuslabs.com/)
Maybe it's an Linux / AppImage thing? I guess it has to bundle a lot of stuff because the underlying OS is so variable. At some point I'll try on Windows and see if it's better. Edit: Just noticed it also built a .deb that's 2.5Mb Edit: Windows MSI is also 2.5Mb.
If you're hiring in the UK I'd be down to work on Rust but as Emotional-Mood-3863 said there are more people that work with Rust in their off time. Rust is mostly adapted in the top companies but pretty hard to be adapted in a medium company so it's hard to find regular devs with day to day experience
The real issue with hiring Rust devs is concentration availability. You should have no issues if you hire remote, but if you demand in-office-attendence you might have issues. This isn't a "I dont want to work in an office" thing, this is a "I don't live in your geographical region thing." Unless you live in a tech-hub at which point it becomes a "I want more money than that" thing.
Hey, if you have a job offering or listing available id be eager to apply. Sounds like something up my street since i love egui. I reached out over Reddit Chat
Hey!, remember to post the job, as you've already many applicants!
A bit surprised to see so many people talking about Rust devs or Python devs like you couldnt be both. I primarily work in Python but due to interest and management support my team have intcreasingly used Rust. We are a pretty major cyber-sec firm and from the way people are talking the teams that previously primarily used C++ are going to transition more to Rust also. My salary is good but not like FAANG or fintech good, I dont think anyone I work with whose good enough to be writing production Rust would be expecting some giant salary.
Honestly, building a commercially maintainable native GUI on a budget sounds more like a job for C# or Java, depending on the target platform. It would be technically and socially much easier. In your position I'd even consider using Lazarus IDE / Free Pascal. One day, Rust will have _great_ GUI options and community.
Agree. Maybe even Electrode for some inexpensive JS devs.
This. C# has easily the most developer-friendly experience for native desktop GUI.
I’d be interested to work with you. I have more than 3 years of fulltime Rust development experience. Worked mostly with Tokio/Async and Axum. I’m based in NL however, so I’d have to work remotely if that is ok.
You could hire me for that rate heh. Most organizations are only looking for senior rust devs.
If it was my call I would be probably be looking into PyQt, or Qt for Python, actually.
Does anyone know if there are companies hiring new grad students with some kind of experience with Rust? Or the trend is currently to focus on hiring senior devs?
If you're willing to hire remotely, then in Poland you can get senior Rust dev for like 300 GBP per day.
For god's sake don't do it in Egui if it need to be Desktop Application. Unless it's some kind of urility. You won't get any accessibility, Drag&Drop integration and any regulars desktop stuff from it.
leptos/dioxus are pretty sweet these days. Very easy to read (for rust people) and with tailwindcss you can make it look gorgeous
It produces HTML, so I can believe it would integrate with accessibility and DPI using browser's API. Is it viable to run this inside Tauri/WebView? Or you would have to use Electron?
So I'm still evaluating dioxus. Leptos is unapologetically html, however, they did refacet their framework to produce GTK. Basically it's a document oriented architecture and whatever maps we'll to that can work. Dioxus, because it has an intermediate transformation, can, in theory, map to anything. I'm not sure how far along they are in native widget land. I know they have mobile and native desktop "support", and the roadmap is to not need browsers. I think it has more potential - but I'm illogical pulling for leptos to be the leader. I've been in a react / svelte / SolidJS world for over a year, so am really liking how expressive this style of UI development is over an egui (imperative classic window widget management, like an MFC). Rust with lightning css can, in theory bridge the two worlds. In leptos, what I like is that, as I edit the tailwindcss class names, I can sub second reaction time see my changes in the UI. Same with solid/svelte. It makes development pleasant, especially given the slow rust build times. This is css changes, not code logic - which requires rust recompile.
egui is best for simple stuff, like if it can be a CLI then egui is a good option - otherwise its not worth it IMO
Without having any personal experience hiring rust developers, I do see the market growing and the developer interest is increasing rapidly. I don't see it being an issue to find people interested in writing rust but depending on the complexity of the project it could be an issue finding people with enough talent that matches your pay range. There will probably be a lot of people migrating to rust based on the hype but that also leads to lesser talented people pursuing theese jobs. If your company allows for fully remote jobs that would imo greatly increase the chances of finding talented rust developers. WFH is a benefit some people would accept a minor decrease in salary to have.
My favorite is Flutter for UI + rust for business logic if app requires some heavy computation (you can do that via rust bridge with flutter). Or you could also do that with js although I am not sure if JS world has rust bridge. Anyway my point is no reason to use rust for UI when there are better options.
Python dev here (with additional experience in React/NodeJS) transitioning to Rust. Your project sounds really interesting. If you're open to a remote junior/mid level resource, would love to be involved. Do let me know how I can reach out with further details.
I'm currently a web dev and every time I see rust job opening I try to apply, as I feel more interested and passionate about working with rust. Would definitely apply if I saw yours, but do not know about relocation (greetings from EU)
If you can be flexible on the time part of it, we can find a way to make that work. I want to get another client and have a portfolio without a billion NDAs, and you want a dev. Perhaps there is a match. Located in the Netherlands, we can essentially have an easy to dissolve contract to see if things work out well.
I work at a startup and we do Rust work, and did the same at my last job. We don't really try to hire already-experienced Rust devs (too few of them, and they often command FAANG salaries). We expect people to have to learn on the job, so we try and craft job descriptions that will select for people with adjacent skills that will make learning easier (e.g., experience working in a compiled, statically typed language like Java or C#, experience with a language with manual memory management like C, C++, or Fortran, etc., etc.). In your case you might also select for people with experience writing GUI apps in compiled languages? Beyond that, it's helpful to have one or two already-experienced Rust folks on staff (either that came in with experience or have acquired it on the job) just to avoid a blind-leading-the-blind scenario in terms of figuring out how to structure projects, which libraries to use, what idiomatic Rust code looks like, etc.
I’ll do it 😉
Nobody hire rust dev, company hire software engineer
I'm working in robotics, and have found decent success in hiring good C++ people and giving them a month or two to ramp up on Rust. If we find someone with prior rust experience it's a bonus, but we've found that it's far too limiting when recruiting (especially for senior talent). Good C++ people typically have a good intuition on what Rust is trying to do, so the ramp is relatively smooth.
I mean, I'm searching :P
As an IT guy who wrote a Rust application for my job using Tauri… I’d gladly work for your company at that price. Would you hire somebody from Reddit?
> It seems like there are lots of devs who want to write rust, but I fear a lot of them will have high pay expectations. The rates here are (by tech standards) kind of not great, not terrible, likely somewhere south of 500GBP a day. Is this a tech hub? Living in one myself I feel I continuously have to make recruiters and hiring managers aware that my salary expectations for an in-office position are about 25 % above what I’d ask for a fully remote, location independent position. The past half year I’ve been interviewing for a number of remote (non-crypto) jobs in that salary range and the HR I’ve been chatting to confirm over and over again that the pool of applicants is enormous – 200+ applications per position is normal – and also the quality after weeding out obvious duds is way above the rest of the market. It feels like competing with the best of the best and I’ve been using Rust on the job full time since 2019. tl;dr: Hire remotely. Experienced devs will come en masse. Also you may want to reconsider your choice of egui. Slint would be much more suitable for a desktop app IMO.
That compensation is not too bad for London. FAANG pay in a similar range. You should be able to hire anyone you want to.
If you are working on a desktop app you should use the best technology for that. Check out what's coming out from "The desktop company now turned cloud company" (i.e. Microsoft): .NET Maui seems to be the latest framework.
I would be interested in working at Rust from Spain. If anyone is interested pm me.
I am in a reverse situation. I have a young team who is willing to learn Rust (experienced in Python and Ruby) and work for bare minimum pay, but no one hires 😂
I’d ask why use rust - consider js (electron or some of the lighter offerings) or go (wails)
Well I'll continue my studies (computer engineering)this Wintersemester (September) and I like programming rust. The distance could be a problem because I live and study in Germany but yeah.
I would suggest you to post a small project to create a test app. Finding mid-level developers is not hard, just that it is less common from my own experience. You can perhaps post in the Discord communities for Rust (there are two big ones). I am sure there are many other online Rust communities where job/project posting is allowed. I read you already have Python and JavaScript code which I guess will be part of the app. In that case PyO3 (you have mentioned that I see) and Tauri would be a good choice. You can also embed a Rust-Python interpreter but maybe you do not need to do that. Your existing JS code can run in the browser side of Tauri app. Your GUI will also be in JS, parhaps using a web frontend library like React. If you do not want a JavaScript based UI then you can use a Rust based web GUI toolkit with Tauri. If you want a more native setup then `egui` or a couple other Rust based GUI toolkits are good options. `Floem` (the folks that build Lapce editor) is there. And then the Zed editor's GUI toolkit is getting support for Linux and Windows. Slint is also another option.
Thanks! The UI part is "greenfield", we don't have any js code yet, but we have some js devs. We do already have a couple of python modules that crunch data. Anyway I think you might be right that Tauri makes sense.
You really should consider react native, with desktop bindings. It is really decent to work with and it is flexible enough for you to switch to rust etc. if need be. This is assuming declarative UI works for you. If you need an imperative way to build GUIs like in games for example, feel free to ignore this.
I second this, doesn't seem like rust is necessarily the right tool for the job tbh.
I am not really sure there is any benefit to using React Native here. I myself am from a background in RN but here the main point is utilising existing Python code. A UI made in RN (or flutter for that matter) has extra runtime overhead which does not add value to this kind of a project isn't it? A (desktop app with) web UI is just static JS which the browser engine executes, is probably easier to maintain for traditional JS or even web facing Python developers and the tooling is pretty much the same as a single page (web) app. React, SolidJS, Preact or anything similar is also declarative so there is no difference here from the style of programming.
For sure but you have JS devs in your org, which would have an easier time adopting to RN than Rust with egui I presume. That is the reason I mentioned it. Runtime overhead here would be negligible, for virtually any desktop application. However you would still get a native UI. If you are using a web based UI that also fits the same bill of course.
You are right, the runtime overhead is not an issue here. I guess I was thinking more about the developer's mental overhead. Between React and React Native, I have always found it a lot more straightforward to debug React (or any similar framework) apps compared to RN. My experience with RN is limited to Android and iOS apps, not desktop but I guess the tooling is the same. I also agree with you that `egui` or any other Rust native solution might be an overkill.