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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[–] 143 points 2 years ago (6 children)

If moving to another language erases 15 years of experience, you probably don't have a good grasp on the fundamentals...

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  • [–] 46 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    15 years is just about enough to understand how initializing a variable works in C++: https://randomcat.org/cpp-initialization/initialization.png

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    [–] 73 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    What the hell is going on with the kerning in that screenshot? My eyes, they bleed.

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    [–] 53 points 2 years ago

    This really implies a level of competence and understanding among the highest levels of management that I think we all know just isn't there.

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  • [–] 41 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    Anti-Rust crusaders: "C is easy actually and Rust is pointlessly annoying and hard to learn"

    Also anti-Rust crusaders:

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    ancient amateur C coder here (not even c++). picked up python about 5 years ago (cuz why not?). been playing around with rust for a bit (like it so far). only issue is recoded tools getting released under mit license instead of gpl (cuz, get off my lawn!).

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    [–] 41 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    @onlinepersona the master plan to remove old senior devs is ... to train new senior devs.

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    [–] 24 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    @onlinepersona ah, the time-honored tradition of The Big Rewrite 'cause it's cheap. Where do people get these horseshit ideas?

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  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago

    Probably from the same spot where they get the idea that languages literally designed within the first few decades of our profession are the pinnacle of technical excellence and can never be surpassed.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Rust is a conspiracy to bring down wages! Rust is a conspiracy to replace GPL with MIT to gain control of Linux! Rust is a conspiracy to impregnate your dog!

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    This whole circumstance just reminds me of COBOL. Nowadays you have scant few programmers for it, but the ones who do demand a big salary because it's such old specialized technology and often they have decades of experience in it. There's simply less COBOL programmers than there were in the languages heyday, and the ones trying to enter that market nowadays have a huge learning curve ahead of them.

    The only reason most of these places that do that though, is because they wrote in COBOL to begin with decades ago, and didn't want to switch away to something more modern as other languages gained functionality and popularity.

    I doubt C is ever going to go the way that COBOL has, it's too ubiquitous, but it does make one consider the language you write in and how compatible it may be not just with what exists today but what's going to exist years from the creation of that code.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The only reason most of these places that do that though, is because they wrote in COBOL to begin with decades ago, and didn’t want to switch away to something more modern as other languages gained functionality and popularity.

    And it would've been much cheaper to rewrite once some years ago than to keep paying people to maintain it.

    And in many cases, rewriting something improves the code substantially by finding bugs and fixing architectural issues. Old code doesn't mean it's correct, it's just old, and just today we had a high severity bug from code that was never properly tested and sat unchanged since near the start of the project.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The US government recommending memory safe languages has really given people worms in their heads

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago

    This is triggering me really good. Especially the part about seniors competing with juniors. Has this person ever met .... people?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    I seriously doubt changing language would impact a senior that much...

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    Rust is one of the harder languages for beginners to learn because of its borrow checker and strict ownership model, but it shouldn't take more than a month or two for a competent senior to pick up.

    It's going to be deeply unpleasant and seem like a problem if:

    • You're writing dangerously bad C or C++ code already.
    • You've only ever used Python or JavaScript.
    • You try to shoehorn OOP and inheritance into it (Rust idioms are composition and functional programming).
    • You refuse to use/learn pattern matching.
    • You're a pedant about "pretty" syntax.

    If someone is at a senior level and any of those apply, they probably shouldn't be at a senior level, though.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago*

    You’re a pedant about “pretty” syntax.

    Oh I'm definitely whinging about it but it doesn't make me stop using Rust. People coming from C or especially C++ don't really have a leg to stand on, though, neither do people coming from ML. It's Haskell people who get hit hardest.

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  • Can confirm, I'm a senior and I didn't have much trouble with Rust. After a couple weeks, I was writing useful code. After a month, I generally stopped cussing at the compiler.

    I'm still finding odd surprises here and there, but it's honestly no big deal. I'm about as productive in Rust as I am in Python, which I use at my day job, though I use them for very different domains.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I'm still learning Rust coming from Python and R and honestly point 2 and 3 are not even that bad. Sure I have been bashing my head against some corners, and the lack of OOP was somewhat unexpected, but imho the language really helps you think about what you are doing.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    This is such an incredible self-own.

    Either:

    • C++ is such a horrific language and Rust is so vastly superior that a person with 6 months of experience in Rust can be as productive and valuable as someone with 30 years of experience in C++.

    • The person writing the post, and according to them C++ programmers in general, bring virtually nothing to the table other than knowing the syntax and semantics of C++, even after 30 years of programming.

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    Wait, so saving a ton of money by using a language that reduces production bugs is now a bad thing?

    I'm a senior sw engineer, and I don't get paid because I know the vagueries of whatever language we're using, I get paid because I can lead a team that solves problems. I don't really care what the language is, but I do care that it's relatively easy to on-board someone in case we have turnover or something.

    I don't know about you, but I'd rather be highly paid because I'm able to be really productive instead of highly paid because I'm literally the only shot the company has of fixing the bug.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    Bruh. Just put Rust on your resume. It's not like they'll actually check and you can still Google everything.

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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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    [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    is this the programmers' version of "Dey took 'er jerbs!! Durka der!!"

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    [–] 10 points 2 years ago*

    Here's a shocking (/s) observation: it's about different things for different people.

    For seniors like the author, it may be about companies trying to replace them with cheaper professionals. For companies, it may be about renewing the workforce. For product owners / tech leads, it could be about the opportunity of using a rewrite to pick a stack that better aligns with the problems they're trying to solve. For regulators it may be about its safety features and eliminating entire categories of common issues. For juniors, it may be about choosing a language they actually like working with.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Now you C++ fuckers know how I felt when you introduced C++ and devalued my COBOL skillset

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    https://www.softpost.org/rust/difference-between-rust-and-c

    So, this "senior developer" is .. braindead & still allowed to be working, then?

    _ /\ _

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I'm almost 22 and I have six years of intensive Rust usage, confirmed by many projects and contributions on Github. Switching to Rust was the best decision I ever made, because this post is partly true

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    The US government spending tens of millions of dollars funneling every student into STEM for the last 20 years was absolutely a coordinated attempt to drive down the cost of that labor.

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    [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    This has been the nature of technical innovation since forever. Carriage mechanics were replaced by car mechanics and leech farmers were replaced by phlebotamists

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I'll take salty C++ masochist for 5

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