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Rust is now a government conspiracy (programming.dev)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/rust@programming.dev
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It's getting more and more unhinged on LinkedIn.

A linkedin post by a Senior Embedded Engineer stating: Using Rust is a political solution to deskill a generation of coders to replace higher-cost labor with lower The push for Rust isn't just a technical decision - it's a calculated economic strategy. By forcing rewrites of stable systems in a new language, companies effectively reset the clock on developer experience and expertise. When a C/C++ codebase with 30 years of institutional knowledge gets rewritten in Rust, senior developers with decades of experience suddenly compete on more equal footing with juniors who just graduated. Your 15 years of C++ optimization knowledge? Now worth less than a 22-year-old's six months of Rust bootcamp training. This isn't about memory safety - it's about labor costs. Companies call it "modernization" while quietly erasing the premium they'd otherwise pay for experience. The technical arguments serve as perfect cover for what's really happening: deliberately manufacturing a scenario where they can replace $250K senior engineers with $80K juniors. The pattern is familiar to anyone who's watched other industries. Create artificial obsolescence of existing skills, then exploit the resulting chaos to reset salary expectations and eliminate the leverage that comes with specialized knowledge. This is why language transitions always seem to coincide with hiring freezes and "restructuring." It's never been about technical superiority - it's about breaking labor's bargaining power.
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[–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

This is so fucking stupid, I can't even.

For your mental health, have some reasonable arguments about Rust: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Entwicklung-Warum-Rust-die-Antwort-auf-miese-Software-und-Programmierfehler-ist-4879795.html

Since it's in German, here are the key points of the article (written from memory - the article is quite old, so I might misremember - best read the article yourself):

  • Software development is stuck in a vicious cycle regarding project budgets.
    • Some competitors don't know better and just budget the "happy path", that assumes that everything during development goes right.
      • The author uses a term for this which I like a lot: "Hybris of the programmer"
    • Other competitors know better, but still have to lie in order to remain competitive when it comes to prices
    • Therefore almost all software projects end up with a way too low budget
      • So we get buggy software
  • Rust might be a way out of this misery, because
    • it is understood that it takes longer to develop something with Rust
    • but on the flip-side the safety-guarantees rule out a lot of bugs
    • so customers who choose to have their project implemented using Rust are fully aware of the higher costs, but also the higher quality
    • and developers have a well known argument for the higher costs, and also have data that shows how this higher investment will yield a better quality product.
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