How To Get A Rust Job Part II: Introducing Rust At Your Current Company

1. Fostering Adoption- The Lesser-Known Option

Not every professional Rust developer joins a company already using Rust. Some introduce it to the company themselves!

About half of the respondents to our survey got a job at a company that was already using Rust. The other half found that their company started using Rust after they were hired. Those are two very different paths, so we decided to create two articles. This one will focus on introducing Rust at your current job. You can read the first article about getting a job at a company already using Rust here.

In this installment, we'll share things like who's been successful introducing Rust at their current company, how they made the case, and what kind of companies are most receptive.

2. Who's Leading The Rust Charge?

83.3% of those who introduced Rust were senior developers.

These aren't usually junior devs sneaking Rust into a side project. These are experienced engineers with influence. Even then, many were specifically tasked with leading teams or modernizing a particular stack. This is probably not that surprising to hear.

What is surprising is that experience with Rust specifically seemed to have little correlation with an engineer's ability to influence Rust adoption.

• 33.3% were beginners
• 33.3% were advanced
• The remaining third included no experience, intermediate, and expert categories.

In other words, you don’t have to be a Rust wizard to be a Rust champion, but seniority and credibility matter.

3. Why Companies Said Yes To Rust

There wasn't just one reason companies were willing to give Rust a shot. Here's what respondents said when we asked them why Rust was adopted:

• 33.3% said leadership was already on board
• 33.3% said technical justifications like memory safety and speed won out
• 16.7% said an internal proof-of-concept made the difference

Your job will be easy if you've already got leadership on board. If that's not the case, it looks like the best strategy is to educate about Rust's benefits AND prove them out with a PoC.

It is worth noting that Rust seemed to most frequently enter the conversation as an answer to C/C++ pain like memory leaks and data races.

4. Company Profiles: Which Companies Were Open To Rust

We asked respondents about the size of their company:

• 25% said 1-10 people
• 25% said 10-25 people
• 16.7% 25-100 people
• 0% 100-1000 people
• 33.3% said 1000+ people

It doesn't seem like there is a noteworthy relationship between company size and willingness to adopt Rust.

We also asked respondents what industry their company is in:

• 50% miscellaneous
• 33.3% robotics/iot/automotive
• 16.7% defense/intelligence

Generally, the companies that adopted Rust were spread across various industries, highlighting the versatility of Rust. However, we did notice an unusual skew in the data toward companies building software for the "real world" in categories like robotics and defense. Perhaps the benefits of Rust are more dramatic in these industries, making them more interesting candidates for Rust adoption.

5. Signs A Company Might Be Open To Rust

We asked respondents if there were any clear, early indicators that they might be successful introducing Rust at their company. Here's what they said were the tells:

• 50% said the company let them pick the language
• 16.7% said the tech stack wasn't yet established
• 16.7% said the company had prior interest or had previously experimented with Rust
• 16.7% said they had personal ownership over the tooling or architecture

In short: influence + flexibility = opportunity for Rust.