3 ms·

There seems to me like there is a clear third option here which is for the organisation to buy an online rust course or select some of the (many) free materials

by rcarr 4y ago

There seems to me like there is a clear third option here which is for the organisation to buy an online rust course or select some of the (many) free materials online and pay a few existing employees (or new employees with previous programming experience but no rust experience) to do nothing but study those resources for two months before making them the senior devs/tech leads of the codebase. What is it with organisations refusing to pay to train and upskill employees nowadays? It is such short minded thinking to not invest in your own people.

huijzer 4y ago
How would you like it to hear that you’ll be a Rust programmer tomorrow if you have been a happy X programmer working on system Y for, say, 10 years?
- karmakurtisaani 4y ago
  Sign me up!
- rcarr 4y ago
  Tbh mate I think this is a bit of a daft contrarian take. Clearly you would offer it to existing employees to see if anyone was interested then, if not, hire new employees like I said in the comment. If you've still failed to find an employee (who is going to get paid to do nothing but learn a brand new language and then be senior dev/tech lead for it which would be a pretty sweet gig for a lot of people) you would then do the heavy handed approach of forcing an employee to learn it. At the end of the day you can't have a critical piece of organisation infrastructure completely unmaintained and if you have to, then you'll have to strong arm someone in to it, but you should always aim to do that as the complete last resort. And if you are going to do it, you can probably sweeten the deal with a pay rise or other perks. But I seriously don't think you'd have to because if you were a junior/intermediate dev and someone offered you an opportunity like this to both learn a new language whilst getting paid and rise a rank in position and compensation you'd be mad not to take it.
- ekidd 4y ago
  Honestly? I do the job that's in front of me. That has included everything from pre-STL C++, to 90s-era PHP and even Visual Basic for Applications. And a few things even more obscure than that. I do sympathize with agency's situation—I have actually put Rust into production and been responsible for mentoring programmers to work on it. I like Rust! But I almost certainly wouldn't have chosen Rust for a government production system without making sure that all the stakeholders understood the tradeoffs. Although, it sounds like this was an abandoned R&D prototype that was voluntarily picked up by another team, so I don't necessarily blame anyone involved here.
- brightball 4y ago
  Personally, the most important trait I look for when hiring programmers is desire to learn. It’s a natural proxy for both motivation and problem solving. It’s one thing if we are talking about a Dilbert-level “we are going to rewrite our system in X” but learning something new to support an existing system that performs well? At worst it’s good resume material and at best it should be interesting enough to expand how you think about coding. Not wanting to learn it at all would be odd.
- Keyframe 4y ago
  Kind of the same as with "here's legacy VB/php/ruby/nodejs shit to take care of", but better?
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  I volunteer as tribute. Rust is on the list of stuff I’d be excited to learn and use professionally, more so than other stuff I’ve only learned by necessity. I’m just not sure how often it’s worth the effort, compared with the runtime cost of GC and immutability or mutexes.

by rcarr 4y ago

huijzer 4y ago

How would you like it to hear that you’ll be a Rust programmer tomorrow if you have been a happy X programmer working on system Y for, say, 10 years?

karmakurtisaani 4y ago
Sign me up!
rcarr 4y ago
Tbh mate I think this is a bit of a daft contrarian take. Clearly you would offer it to existing employees to see if anyone was interested then, if not, hire new employees like I said in the comment. If you've still failed to find an employee (who is going to get paid to do nothing but learn a brand new language and then be senior dev/tech lead for it which would be a pretty sweet gig for a lot of people) you would then do the heavy handed approach of forcing an employee to learn it. At the end of the day you can't have a critical piece of organisation infrastructure completely unmaintained and if you have to, then you'll have to strong arm someone in to it, but you should always aim to do that as the complete last resort. And if you are going to do it, you can probably sweeten the deal with a pay rise or other perks. But I seriously don't think you'd have to because if you were a junior/intermediate dev and someone offered you an opportunity like this to both learn a new language whilst getting paid and rise a rank in position and compensation you'd be mad not to take it.
ekidd 4y ago
Honestly? I do the job that's in front of me. That has included everything from pre-STL C++, to 90s-era PHP and even Visual Basic for Applications. And a few things even more obscure than that. I do sympathize with agency's situation—I have actually put Rust into production and been responsible for mentoring programmers to work on it. I like Rust! But I almost certainly wouldn't have chosen Rust for a government production system without making sure that all the stakeholders understood the tradeoffs. Although, it sounds like this was an abandoned R&D prototype that was voluntarily picked up by another team, so I don't necessarily blame anyone involved here.
brightball 4y ago
Personally, the most important trait I look for when hiring programmers is desire to learn. It’s a natural proxy for both motivation and problem solving. It’s one thing if we are talking about a Dilbert-level “we are going to rewrite our system in X” but learning something new to support an existing system that performs well? At worst it’s good resume material and at best it should be interesting enough to expand how you think about coding. Not wanting to learn it at all would be odd.
Keyframe 4y ago
Kind of the same as with "here's legacy VB/php/ruby/nodejs shit to take care of", but better?
erik_seaberg 4y ago
I volunteer as tribute. Rust is on the list of stuff I’d be excited to learn and use professionally, more so than other stuff I’ve only learned by necessity. I’m just not sure how often it’s worth the effort, compared with the runtime cost of GC and immutability or mutexes.