At a past job we generally saw about 6 months until devs hit their stride and worked that into our hiring plans. We usually had them committing small, targeted changes within a week or two. They could usually take on tasks relatively independently in one of our simpler code bases after about 2 months. So this checks out.
Weird enough we saw more junior devs pick it up faster. They had less preconceived notions and practices to unlearn and more willing to trust rustc. It's just that when they hit their stride they are still less productive than the senior devs.
As an older dev:
> They had less preconceived notions and practices to unlearn and more willing to trust rustc.
this is really what I experiences: rust told me a thing or two about coding I never realized. And it took me pretty long to accept that :-)
I've found Rust useful to study while I'm doing my primary job in C++.
A lot of the features Rust offers regarding traits and types can be emulated in C++ with templates, but the way C++ does it is far more obfuscated. Seeing the same thing implemented in Rust helped me wrap my head around what some complicated template nestings were doing ("Oh, this is implementing traits!") in our C++ code.
Big same. I remember being not being able to share a reference to something allocated on the stack at the start of main to a background thread. I was like "come on, of course its safe. That was allocated before the thread was spawned. It's main. When it returns the application exits"
But rustc's error messages helped it click that there might be a race condition on when the application returns from main and the background thread terminates. So it really needs to have the static life time to be safe. It's a small subtle thing but depending on the application it could lead to real bugs. I've definitely written variations of that bug in C before. A newer dev would have just accepted that flat out without arguing.