Ask HN: Job prospects for pure C and C++ programmers?

I'm very familiar with the psychology of programming. Read the classics: Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming, Tom DeMarco's Peopleware, Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month. Notice that those books are all about programming but not about languages. Alistair Cockburn studied programming success and failures and concluded that team dynamics -- "soft" people skills -- are a first-order driver of project success. Brooks came to a similar conclusion.

Mastering several languages well enough to produce working code and (more important) participating in a team and business organization is a necessary precondition to calling yourself a programmer. But language mastery is not sufficient for long-term success (many of the languages and all of the tools and platforms I worked with in the 1970s and 80s are extinct today), nor is it sufficient to contribute at a senior level. By analogy a person can get through life just knowing how to hammer a nail, but they aren't going to work their way up to architect doing that, and eventually they'll get replaced by a nail gun.

One thing I learned early on, thanks to some good mentors and managers, was that expanding my interests and skills out of programming would improve my chances of surviving a layoff or getting made obsolete. The most recent incident, at my last full-time job at an educational software company, illustrates that. Most of the programmers I worked with limited themselves to a couple of programming languages, hated meetings, did not interact with marketing or sales or management except under duress. When the company's fortunes turned and they started laying people off, I survived. I actually asked the CEO (my two direct managers had been laid off) why more senior people had lost their jobs but I hadn't. He told me that I was the only programmer who had taken an interest in the business, could work with marketing people, and had expanded my skills when needed (I had to learn enough Lisp in a hurry to deal with a product the company bought and had to integrate, no one else volunteered).

I've had similar experiences in my career, and I attribute it to being that one person, or one of a small number of programmers, who took the opportunity to learn the business domain and contribute in ways beyond just writing code. I survived at another company that replaced a lot of in-house code with a Salesforce-like product, probably because I was one of the only people in the programming group who didn't crap all over and moan about the management decision (I actually pointed out that our backlog of technical debt evaporated when the company moved to a third-party solution).

I still write code most of the time, but my customers (most of whom I've had for 3 years or more, a couple for a decade) tell me they appreciate that I take an interest in their business and help them solve business problems, rather than just telling them that rewriting in Rust or whatever will solve everything, which most managers have heard (or tried to do) enough times by now to show some caution.

If we don’t constantly hone our skills and learn new things we risk getting left behind. I think programmers can imagine that as a bigger threat than it is, but it can happen if one chooses a dead end to specialize in. Not getting in on a trend early presents the risk of getting left behind, especially in today’s tech hiring process that often requires experience with relatively young languages and tools. That said I would still focus on the larger trends rather than specific languages or tools.

When I got into programming 40 years ago it was just barely possible to learn most of the major languages and tools used in business applications. Today that’s not even possible for niches like web development. I read an interview with Bill Gates a while back. We’re close to the same age. He said he just got lucky, born at the right time, and he got into programming as a teenager and grew up with the technology. He said it’s much harder now to get started because there are so many places to start, so much to learn, and the languages and tools continue to drop on us faster than we can keep up. That can lead to despair, or over-specialization.

I now specialize in web applications, but I can’t learn everything, so I don’t try. I wait until something gets traction, when I start seeing demand from customers (rather than HN buzz or a mention in the TIOBE rankings), before I pay attention to it. Once a language or tool gets significant traction it tends to have a long lifespan: Unix, C, COBOL, SQL and relational databases, PHP, etc. I work mainly on legacy software so I don’t have to stay bleeding edge. I know this seems like a boring “I give up” path, and I partly got here because of increasing age discrimination, but it let me relax a bit about keeping up with beta versions of Rust and React and focus more on what my customers actually want.