A Rust expert who deleted 150,000 lines of code and ranked 16th in global contributions is publicly seeking a job online? The job preference has sparked controversy: "Firmly reject generative AI."

In the open-source world, the prosperity of a programming language often relies on the long-term dedication of core contributors. However, when it becomes a problem to "support core developers," even the most powerful communities can reveal their vulnerable side.

Recently, there has been a regrettable incident in the Rust community: Two highly influential Rust contributors, Nicholas Nethercote and Micheal Goulet, are looking for new jobs. These two are almost the "backbone" of the Rust compiler team. Their sudden job searches have sparked concerns and heated discussions across the entire community.

Many developers' first reaction was: This is exactly the moment for the Rust Foundation to step in and help. Some even bluntly said: If the foundation can't even guarantee the jobs of core contributors, what on earth is the money it gets from big companies for?

Two Rust Gurus Start Looking for New Jobs Simultaneously

On July 14th this year, when well - known Rust compiler contributor Micheal Goulet was introducing his PR on a social platform, he casually asked, "Who can find me a job so that I can keep doing this kind of work?"

A few days later, on July 18th, Nicholas Nethercote, also a well - known compiler engineer in the Rust community, published a blog post titled "I'm a Rust compiler engineer looking for a new job."

Different from Micheal Goulet's casual inquiry, Nicholas Nethercote was more eager to find a new job:

"For the past 3.75 years, I've been very lucky to work on the Rust team at Futurewei, with almost complete freedom to improve Rust. This experience was the highlight of my career. But unfortunately, due to budget cuts, the team is downsizing, and this job will soon end."

In his view, besides the influence of the international situation, there is another important reason: "AI has taken away most of the funding and attention, leaving fewer resources for other technologies." And Nicholas Nethercote bluntly said, "Rust is a great project, and it deserves to be maintained full - time and with a salary. I hope I can continue to work in this direction."

Hardcore Data: Over 3000 Commits, 'Read Through' the Compiler Code

To prove his worth, Nicholas Nethercote showed off his "achievements" in the Rust project in his blog post:

● In the rust - lang/rust library, he made a total of 3375 commits, of which 2815 were made in three years at Futurewei.

● In terms of GitHub contributions, he has a total of 4013 contributions and is currently ranked 16th globally (15th after excluding bots).

● He has almost read all the files in the over 700,000 lines of code under the Rust compiler directory; he has modified 75 out of 77 crates.

According to Nicholas Nethercote, his core abilities mainly focus on: compiler performance optimization and benchmarking, lexical analysis, syntax parsing, AST and macro expansion, compilation error generation mechanism, data flow analysis framework, and code generation unit (CGU) splitting.

In other words, he has played a part in the performance improvement, macro expansion optimization, error message improvement, and code cleaning of the Rust compiler in recent years. Almost everyone who has used Rust has directly or indirectly benefited from his work.

It's particularly worth mentioning that Nicholas Nethercote joked and summarized, "The most common starting word for my commits is 'Remove'. Out of 3375 commits, 752 start with 'Remove'." He explained that he has deleted 150,000 lines of code just by deleting. For a large and complex compiler project, the ability to dare and effectively "delete code" is a scarce skill.

Besides, Nicholas Nethercote has also contributed to tools like rustdoc, clippy, and cargo. He even maintained the "Rust Performance Handbook" and has been active in the community for a long time. It can be said that he is both a "performance optimization master" and a "code cleaner." He has been involved in large - scale refactoring and dealing with long - standing technical debts.

Job - Seeking Intentions: Full - Time Maintenance of Rust, Rejection of Blockchain and Generative AI

After generally introducing his achievements in Rust, Nicholas Nethercote clearly stated his job - seeking intentions at the end of his blog post:

(1) First choice: Be able to continue maintaining Rust full - time;

(2) Second choice: Work on open - source and interesting application projects using Rust;

(3) Firm rejection: Blockchain/cryptocurrencies, generative AI, quantitative trading, and leaving Melbourne.

Similarly, Micheal Goulet also mentioned in his LinkedIn profile that he rejects the cryptocurrency or blockchain direction.

The 'AI Money - Sucking' and Rust's Embarrassment

So, the question is: Why doesn't the Rust Foundation fund such excellent talents?

For this reason, some netizens checked the financial data of the Rust Foundation: In 2023, the foundation's total income was only $250,000. This amount of money is not enough to support two compiler experts, let alone even a junior developer in Silicon Valley.

In contrast, although the donation levels of big companies are impressive - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. are all "platinum sponsors" of the Rust Foundation, it doesn't mean they are willing to pay specifically to support developers. Someone joked, "These companies don't blink an eye when burning billions of dollars on various experimental tools each year, but they are reluctant to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a few core developers."

Some veteran programmers also sighed: In the past, the designers of C and C++ mostly worked in universities or research centers, writing programming languages while doing research with research funds. But in today's open - source world, developers rely more on corporate sponsorship or work out of passion.

What is more realistic and has sparked more discussions among developers is what Nicholas Nethercote mentioned about "AI taking away all resources" and his "firm rejection of generative AI." Some netizens speculated that perhaps it was because he mentioned this in his job - seeking blog post that he couldn't find a new job.

Nowadays, investors are putting money into large - scale models and GPUs, and big companies are pouring their budgets into generative AI. Even though system - level languages like Rust have stepped out of the circle of "niche languages" and entered key scenarios such as operating systems, browsers, databases, and cloud services, it still seems to rely on the hard work of a few full - time developers.

But surely, the future of Rust can't rely solely on developers' "passionate dedication." Who will foot the bill? Is it the foundation, big companies, or a more innovative funding model? Perhaps this is an answer that the entire open - source ecosystem needs to provide as soon as possible.

Reference Links:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1mbyf5z/so_two_of_the_most_notable_contributors_to_rust/

https://bsky.app/profile/errs.io/post/3ltvf4kzoik2l

https://nnethercote.github.io/2025/07/18/looking-for-a-new-job.html

This article is from the WeChat official account "CSDN". Compiled by Zheng Liyuan. Republished by 36Kr with permission.