[Warning: rant]
I went all-in on Rust fairly early, as soon as I became (beta)stable in 2015. Back then, there were very few jobs available, but on the flip side the hiring process for rust jobs was very relaxed. I landed my first Rust job in 2018 after a senior engineer pinged me on IRC. Back then, having been using Rust for two years on your free time and being able to clearly explain the borrowing rules in interview was enough to prove you'd be fit for the job.
Fast forward 2025, Rust has become mainstream-ish, there are now double digit Rust positions spawning every month, but the process became as fucked up as for any tech job:
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Every time you apply, you now need to write 3 different essays to answer questions that are specific to each employers (“Explain, in 1500 words, why you, and only you, will make our VCs go from multi-millionaires to billionaires”). And that's in addition to the cover letter of course.
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Each interview process now have 5 steps spanning over 3-4 weeks. Sometimes there's more hiring steps than there are current employees in the company (this literally happened to me twice!).
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There's a take-away “1h technical test” that takes you 5 hours to complete (or is trivially answered by the dumbest free chatbot, then providing zero insight on the candidate).
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or there's this Swiss company, that make you pass a literal IQ test for **two hours** (I'm happy to know that I'm 125 IQ according to testgorilla. Cool, but how is this tangram puzzle solving skill of mine supposed to translate to actual team work proficiency?) then rejects you without an interview for not being 99th percentile on the test (they explicitly brag about hiring only 1% of applicants in their job description, I thought it was an exaggeration until I got rejected with my 95th percentile mark).
I've been going through this madness for the past three month and a half now, and I'm sick of it already…
