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The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

efinancialcareers.com

121–130 of 869 posts

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#121
post #3

Looks like C++ developers / holdouts will be commanding 400-600k salaries in the comming decades, like those arcane COBOL wizards still tinkering on banking mainframes.

This is literally my career wind-down/retirement plan. I'll be 62 when the Year-2038 problem hits, and they're going to need to overturn some rocks to find C and C++ systems programmers who still can read from a monitor.

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#122
The main issue for me is pay. I’ve used C++ for 15 years, written many design/game engines, frameworks, etc, but C++ jobs don’t pay well. In recent years I’ve been using C# with Unity and I make 25-30% more than I would working in C++. C++ has also changed a lot over the last 5-10 years (a lot for the worse) and requires a big commitment to stay an expert. In order for me to go back to C++ full time I’d need a substantial salary increase and a project that I want to work on.

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#124
post #69

Dear finance folks: Please do write your trading systems in Rust; then at least the poor beeper-wearing support folks maintaining the code doesn't have to come in on the weekend as often to debug those unnecessary null pointer & dangling reference errors causing crashes.

Dear language righteous. I am one of those "poor souls" who writes web and other enterprise backends in C++. I can assure you that I do not come on weekends / woken up at night to fix "null pointer & dangling reference errors causing crashes" or memory leaks. Modern C++ along with libs and tooling provides more than enough features to be done away with those on backend style development. I just simply do not remember the last time I had this kind of problems.

Firmware is a bit different but frankly all of the gadgets I own work just fine ;)

Edit. I am not a C++ zealot. Have used and using many languages.

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, Google is really about a crippled subset of C++, that people jokingly call "C+-". I ran a C++ shop for 25 years. I used to program in it, but stopped, many moons ago. The new C++ is a huge change from what I knew. I am expecting to see a lot of hate for the language, in this thread. Regardless, it is a very powerful language, and it is not for the faint of heart. I attended a Swift conference,…

Perhaps in the past, but they aren't too terribly far behind C++20 and a bunch of stuff that has been added to the language over time (like stringviews) was made available much earlier via library support. I don't think I've ever heard this "C+-" joke at Google despite working in C++ here for a very long time.

I heard it quite frequently, but not from people that worked there.

I believe that there was a published style guide. My experience is years old, but I remember seeing that it was basically “C++ without objects.”

It’s a great language, and the 20 additions bring it right on par with other languages, in terms of type and memory safety.

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#126
post #9

Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby. More demand, more salary. Apart from finance, pay is lower than web languages. And finance is small. Embedded systems programming, that also uses the language, pays 30% less than web jobs from my last job hunting period. Employees may be leaving the embedded space (and C++) for web tech because of this. This is the feeling I get from my local job market (western Europ…

> Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby.

But these are all implemented in C++ or C? Those aren't low-paying jobs.

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#127
post #9

Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby. More demand, more salary. Apart from finance, pay is lower than web languages. And finance is small. Embedded systems programming, that also uses the language, pays 30% less than web jobs from my last job hunting period. Employees may be leaving the embedded space (and C++) for web tech because of this. This is the feeling I get from my local job market (western Europ…

Yes, the embedded space pays terrible, and the employers don't seem great on the whole. When I was at Google I got to work on embedded stuff and really liked it; but I was getting a Google salary. When I left Google I pursued IoT and embedded jobs a bit and while I was not expecting Google level compensation at all, I was astounded at what was going on there, pay wise. General software eng back end jobs pay better. T…

I did a few a few months of contracting at a major voting machine company. They make a significant portion of all US voting machines. They had 4 developer teams Firmware (C++ where I was), UI (web tech on a voting machine), poll book (java), and a web/support team. Before I was hired in a massive influx of contractors each team was something like 3~5 people, except UI which was a new team with the contractor hiring spree.

After the work was done, they shed nearly all the contractors and about half of their previous full time employees. Just quadrupled their staff to make a voting machine then fired them all.

They hired me as an "Embedded Software" on their Firmware team. It was a total shitshow we didn't have unit tests or CI. The new hires insisted on it and I spent a bunch of time maintaining a Jenkins setup for the team that really helped.

The pay wasn't great, a little less than defense contracting, which was a little less than insurance companies and slow finance companies.

If that is what most embedded development is like then I see why it is brings the average down.

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#128

I've been C++ the majority of my career, doing simply amazing shit... and a recent recruiter did not recognize anything I was discussing and asked if I even wrote code. I worked on the original PSX OS, I've delivered over 40 commercial products, all written in C++ and that meant nothing.

That is why I think it is never good idea to talk to recruiters. Most of them would not spot a difference between golden laying goose and some mediocre person. There are enough companies out there where one can come and apply without going through a recruiter.

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#129

As a talented C++ developer... yes there is a dearth of talented C++ developers. I've been to several C++ conferences. Even there, many of the engineers end up learning "new" things that are IMO basic concepts that have been around for years. I recently went through a hiring phase for Senior C++ engineers and most of the applicants were familiar with old tech. It was really disheartening to me to realize how many "se…

I can't help but wonder if developers are simply off-put by the complexity of the language itself. Way back in 1989 I was fortunate enough to get Borland's C/C++ compiler, the K&R C book, and Stroustrup's C++ book - which, at the time, was about the same size as the K&R C book. The C++ language was relatively simple to learn at that time: no STL, no odd pointer types, no template metaprogramming, etc. Fast-forward to…

The odd corner case is called data structures... and linear algebra, and memory management!

Re: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

#130
post #9

Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby. More demand, more salary. Apart from finance, pay is lower than web languages. And finance is small. Embedded systems programming, that also uses the language, pays 30% less than web jobs from my last job hunting period. Employees may be leaving the embedded space (and C++) for web tech because of this. This is the feeling I get from my local job market (western Europ…

It's amazing how badly embedded programming and C++ programming in general pay compared to the others you mention like Python & Ruby. A good C++ programmer has to know a whole lot more (and be careful about a whole lot more) than a Python or Ruby programmer does. C++ is well known to be a complicated beast - probably the most complicated programming language in existence with plenty of footguns. And an embedded developer needs to know a lot about both software and hardware.
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