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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.
The only thing that is true is that new technologies make EVERYONE a junior again.
The rest of your post is plain wrong.
If you've been coding a specific language for 30+ years, and you still have to compete with new grads. You probably are not well suited for the ever-demanding tech space in the first place. And you would be eventually replaced.
I believe programming language is just a tool, and having years of experience writing it should have inevitably made you a specialist enough to understand its deeper concepts, so much that, you can easily recognize the same concepts and patterns in other similar programming languages.
Will Peavy
Enterprise and Solution Architect | Enterprise Systems, Applications, Integrations, Cloud, and Security | TOGAF (In Progress)
10h
Even if the cost per engineer is lower, isn't rewriting a system in a new language more expensive than maintaining the existing system?
You’re on to something here. I wonder who pushed for this solution
Maybe modern languages like Rust just give one far fewer opportunities to cut one's leg off by accident, and thus can do the same job without requiring 30 years of experience?
Also see the economic concept of "sunk cost".
A new conspiracy theory revamped
It was declared from the beginning that the main target of "new languages" like rust and go development was to make them strict to do mistakes harder so, the "same" code quality could be achieved by using less skilled developers. It's an illusion, for sure.
For everyone taking the post seriously, it's satire. It's sad this is what's pushed onto the feeds of thinking people.
Dude, 30% to 50% of the work as a software engineer is actually coding, the other 50% to 70% are completely portable skills that you can still use regardless the change of the new programming language.
That logic that you posted could also apply when we switched from programming with assembler to modern languages like COBOL, or even when C actually came in.
The modernization of programming language is about making more complex things, not about make skills obsolete.
And seriously, learning a new language in the AI era is much more easier, it's never been easier to learn a programming language ever than today.
This is just a take from someone who is bitter.
It’s dumb in 2025 to start a new large project in C/C++ rather than Rust unless there are external factors like needing a specific library or something.
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