Rust Is Loved by Developers. Here’s Why Your CTO Still Says No

I did not lose my job in a layoff. There was no restructuring email. No polite “your role has been affected” message.
I was called into a room, looked in the eye, and told it was over. The official reason was “misaligned technical bets.”
The real reason was simple: I turned our company into a Rust experiment and treated everyone else like they were slow for not keeping up. I did what many developers quietly want to do.
I sold leadership on Rust. I got the budget. I hired the team.
And then I watched the whole thing fall apart in slow motion. If your CTO keeps saying “no” to Rust, this is the story they are trying not to live.

The Day I Sold Rust To The Board

It started in a boardroom with nice coffee and worse honesty. We were a fintech company moving serious money. Our stack was mostly Java. Old, noisy, stable in the way a creaky bridge is stable: it works, but nobody really trusts it. I walked into that room with slides that practically glowed.

• Memory safety
• Performance
• Modern tooling
• Happier engineers
• Less security risk

I said things like: “Our best people are already tinkering with Rust on weekends.”
“We will cut latency and make the platform future-proof.”
“If we don’t modernize, we’ll lose talent and market share.” Heads nodded. People love the word “modern.” 
I hinted at companies that everyone admires using Rust in critical paths.
The board loved the energy. They approved the plan. Later that week, our CTO pulled me aside. “You’re pointing at Rust,” she said, “but the real issues are process and architecture. A new language won’t fix that.”

I heard her voice. I ignored the meaning.
In my head, she was the obstacle, and I was the brave one pushing us forward. That was my first mistake. The Hiring Fantasy That Died In Slow Motion On paper, we needed eight experienced Rust engineers to ensure the migration was safe. In my head, this sounded easy. 
Rust was hot. Everyone online said they loved it.
Surely the world was full of senior Rust devs dying to join a fast-growing fintech. Reality was colder. Month one: zero serious candidates. 
Month two: a few people with good GitHub profiles, all asking for more money than our top Java engineers.
Month three: we hired two seniors, both remote, both opinionated.
Month four: we lowered the bar out of fear and started hiring people who had mainly done side projects.
By month six, half of our “Rust team” was still trying to understand lifetimes and trait bounds. Money was not the only problem, but it was very real.

Those two senior Rust devs cost more than four senior Java engineers.
They also slowed down code review because everything turned into a debate about purity and design. One of them spent weeks creating a hyper-abstract configuration system. Our existing config loader was a simple script that worked. His replacement was a small universe of types and generic parameters. I remember staring at his pull request, impressed and exhausted at the same time.
It was clever. It was beautiful. 
It did nothing to help us ship features faster. That was when I first felt the gap between “this is cool” and “this is useful,” but I pushed that feeling down and called it “investment in quality.”

When The Borrow Checker Beat Our Best Engineer

We had one engineer who was simply better than the rest of us. Sharp, calm, scary fast. The kind of person who can look at a stack trace once and know where the bug is. The person you route production issues to when the rest of the team has given up. She was excited about Rust at first.
Bought the books. Watched the talks. Told everyone, “This is going to make us better.” Then the real work started.

She ran into the borrow checker wall that every Rust developer hits.
At first she laughed about it. Then she got quiet. Eventually she snapped. “This feels like handcuffs,” she said in a review. “I know exactly what the code should do, and I’m wasting my day convincing the compiler I’m not a criminal.” Here is the kind of thing that broke her patience.

What she wanted to write:

// Feels natural when you come from other languages let mut data = vec![1, 2, 3]; let first = &data[0]; data.push(4); // error: cannot borrow `data` as mutable because it is also borrowed as immutable println!("{}", first);

What Rust made her do instead:

let mut data = vec![1, 2, 3]; let first = data[0]; // copy value out data.push(4); // push is now fine println!("{}", first);

To a Rust veteran, this is basic. You see the issue immediately.
To a brilliant engineer under time pressure, it feels like being forced to explain obvious things to a very strict teacher.

The problem was not that she could not learn Rust. She could and she did.
The problem was how the learning curve collided with real deadlines. After a couple of months, she left. 
Joined another company using a more familiar stack.
Messaged me later and said, “I miss the ideas in Rust. I don’t miss that feeling of being slow.” When your fastest engineer walks away, you feel it in your bones.
I still told myself the migration was the right path.
I did not want to admit that the cost was already too high. The Benchmark That Looked Great And Meant Almost Nothing Performance was one of my big talking points in that first board meeting.
“Rust is faster,” I said. “We can do more with fewer machines.” So we measured.

We rewrote one of our core transaction paths in Rust. Same logic, same external calls, same everything, just written in a different language. The micro-benchmark looked amazing:

Raw Processing Only
────────────────────────────────────
Old Java implementation:   8.2 ms
New Rust implementation:   3.1 ms
Difference:                62% faster
I screenshotted this and put it in a slide.
If you only see that table, Rust looks like a miracle.
Then we measured the actual request end to end:
Full Transaction Path
────────────────────────────────────
Database work:             47 ms
External APIs:             89 ms
Network overhead:          23 ms
Our logic (Java):           8.2 ms
Our logic (Rust):           3.1 ms
────────────────────────────────────
Total (before):           167.2 ms
Total (after):            162.1 ms
Real improvement:           ~3% faster

We spent a painful amount of money and developer time to shave about five milliseconds off a path dominated by the database and remote services. On paper, Rust was sixty-plus percent faster.
To the customer waiting on a mobile screen, nothing meaningful changed. That is the moment my stomach dropped. We had already hired the team. 
We were already rewriting more services.
We were in too deep to call it a small experiment. I stopped showing the full numbers to the board.
I cherry-picked slides because I did not want to look like a fool. That was my second major mistake.

Living In Dependency Hell

The developer experience looked shiny at first. Cargo felt neat. The crates ecosystem had a package for nearly everything we needed.
We pulled in libraries quickly and got prototypes running. Then reality showed up in the form of a security audit.

One of our dependencies had a known vulnerability. It depended on another crate which depended on another crate, and so on. A familiar story in every language, except with sharper edges. We did the responsible thing and ran updates. Suddenly half the project stopped compiling. Breaking changes had slipped in. 
Function signatures changed. Error types changed.
The compiler went from green to a wall of messages. Our most experienced Rust engineer sat down to fix it.
Day one: no new features, just chasing errors.
Day two: still fixing. 
Day three: finally back to normal, everyone frustrated. He shrugged and said, “This is just what you deal with sometimes.” In isolation, he was right. Any language with a rich ecosystem has dependency drama. But in the context of a team still learning Rust, it hit harder.
It looked like we had chosen a path where even routine maintenance demanded our best people and blocked everyone else.

When leadership hears “we lost almost half a week to updating libraries,” they do not think “rich ecosystem.”
They think “fragile choice.”

When The Team Finally Said “Enough”

Up to this point, most complaints about Rust were quiet.
Grumbles in one-on-ones. Jokes in chats. “The borrow checker hates me” memes. Then one roadmap meeting broke the pattern. I walked in with a plan to move our payment processor to Rust next.
The tone in the room felt heavier than usual, but I pushed on with my pitch. “We have the patterns now,” I said. “We’ll get faster with each service. This is the natural next step.” Silence.

Then our lead backend engineer said, very calmly, “We should stop.” Not “we should slow down.” Not “we should reconsider.”
Just stop.

He laid it out in plain language:

• We were shipping fewer features than our competitors
• New hires had trouble contributing because the Rust codebase scared them
• Incidents were harder to handle because fewer people felt confident touching the services
• Morale was dropping, even among people who liked the language

I argued back. I talked about future benefits, long-term stability, all the classic phrases. He did not raise his voice. He just said, “Customers do not care that we are clever. They care that we ship.” Looking around the room, I realized most of the team agreed with him.
Some were too tired to say it. Some were waiting to see how I would react. I had a choice. 
I could admit we had gone too far and pivot.
Instead, I dug in.

I said things like “sunk cost” in the wrong direction.
I tied promotions and praise to Rust work without meaning to. Three people resigned within a month. You do not need an incident report to know when you are losing your team.
You feel it in standups, in reviews, in how people stop arguing and just nod.

The Investor Meeting That Ended My Experiment

The board does not care about your choice of language.
They care about numbers. By the time our big quarterly review came around, two trends were clear:

• Revenue growth had slowed
• Our main competitor had shipped features we had promised months earlier

I stood in front of the board and tried to frame our Rust work as “laying the foundation for the next decade.” They were patient for exactly one slide. One of them cut in and asked a simple question: “If this Rust work is so important, why are we shipping less, not more?” I showed the performance graphs. The memory usage charts. The “potential incidents avoided” estimations. He shook his head.

“I don’t care if your code is beautiful,” he said. “I care that customers are leaving because someone else gave them what they wanted while you were rebuilding what already existed.” He reminded us that our CTO had flagged these risks at the start.
He asked why we had not treated this as a small, reversible experiment. There were no good answers left.

We brought in a new leader a few weeks later.
Her first big act was to freeze further Rust development and put critical services back on the old stack. The cost of undoing the migration was brutal.
The cost to my reputation was worse.

What I Finally Understood About CTO Decisions

When you are in love with a language, every “no” feels like fear. You tell yourself leadership is conservative.
You think they do not understand the benefits.
You talk about “modern stacks” and “getting left behind.” After this mess, I started seeing things differently. Most CTOs I know are not afraid of new technology.
They are afraid of uncontrolled risk. They look at things like:

• How many moving parts the team already manages
• How hard it is to hire for each piece of the stack
• How much pressure the roadmap already has
• Whether a change helps the actual bottlenecks, not just the ones developers complain about

They know that most of the code that runs a business is boring glue: input validation, database calls, reporting, API juggling. 
For that kind of work, a boring language with a huge ecosystem wins more often than not. They also know that every new language is not just syntax. 
It is new tooling, new build problems, new security questions, new on-call stories, new postmortems. I had treated Rust as a hero that would come in and fix deep issues by existing.
Our CTO had treated it as one more sharp tool that could cut the company if misused. She was right.

Where Rust Actually Belongs

After everything, people expect me to say “never use Rust.”
That is not how I feel.

Rust is an incredible tool in the right places.
Memory safety matters. Predictable performance matters.
There are domains where those strengths are worth the pain. If you are building low-level infrastructure, real-time engines, or systems where a memory bug is a safety issue, a language like Rust is not a luxury. It is protection. If every millisecond of latency translates directly into revenue or loss, then shaving those milliseconds is not vanity. It is survival.

If you already have a team that has shipped real-world Rust systems before, and they understand the tradeoffs inside production constraints, that is different from “we would like to learn Rust on the job.” Those situations are rare.

Most teams are working on products where the real problems are elsewhere:

• Confusing user flows
• Slow decision-making
• Fragile architecture choices that have nothing to do with language
• Lack of tests, reviews, or clear ownership

Rust cannot fix those. In our case, Rust amplified them.
It made our architecture harder to change.
It exposed gaps in our hiring and onboarding.
It magnified the cost of mistakes I was already making.

Life On A Boring Stack

I work somewhere else now. We use a familiar backend language.
We have a few battle-tested frameworks.
Nobody gets excited about the stack in interviews. We ship.

We still hit bugs. We still have outages. No language erases reality.
But when something breaks, most of the team feels comfortable jumping in. New hires become productive faster.
We can hire locally instead of running a global talent search for very specific skills.
Our discussions in planning revolve around users and features, not type systems. Do I miss Rust sometimes? Yes. 
I still read articles about it. I still respect the design.
I still believe it has a bright future in domains that genuinely need it. I simply do not treat it as a cure-all anymore.

Why Your CTO Keeps Saying No

If you pitch Rust at work and get blocked, it is tempting to blame fear or lack of vision. Maybe that is true where you are.
But it might also be something quieter and less dramatic. Your CTO might see the ghosts of failed migrations.
They might remember teams burned out by chasing perfection.
They might calculate opportunity cost faster than you do.

They know what I had to learn the hard way:

• Technology choices are not only about what is “better” in isolation
• They are about what the team can handle while still delivering value
• They are about risk, timing, and focus

Rust can absolutely be part of that story.
But if your pitch is “because it is cool and safe,” you will lose to “because it helps us ship what customers actually need.”

Tell Me Your Version Of This Story Half the people who read this will think I mismanaged the migration.
They will say the problem was not Rust, but my planning.
They will be right. The other half will feel like this finally explains why their leadership keeps blocking their favorite language.
They will say Rust is overkill for most businesses.
They will also be right, in their context. I am not trying to settle the Rust debate.
I am trying to show you the cost of getting the bet wrong. If you pushed Rust at your company, what happened?
Did you get a small, focused win?
Did you watch a project slow to a crawl?
Did your CTO surprise you with a yes, or a very firm no? And if you are the one sitting in the CTO chair, how do you decide when to approve a risky new tool and when to protect your team from it?

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/@the_atomic_architect/rust-migration-disaster-why-ctos-say-no-ecc9ddb2b9ef