151–160 of 869 posts
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.
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…
To be fair and assume competence: A lot of C++ programmers have been burned by adopting the latest and greatest bling, then having to port it to some backwards platform that doesn't have a recent compiler. Many of us use the legacy stuff when possible, because we know it works, there are already robust third party libraries that interoperate with the legacy stuff, and it is more likely to be portable than std::omfgbb…
I am currently at a not super advanced C++ shop that has to write for several compilers on locked platforms, and even the worst/oldest compilers are clang or gcc forks that support C++17 and some C++20. We have robust CI and if it passes there we can use it (presuming it doesn't violate style guide/best practices/code review/etc). It is unlikely we will be burned by adopting the latest thing for anytime longer one developer is working on it.
I think the companies that are so afraid of upgrading software tooling and related processes incurred huge project costs because of otherwise needless major rewrites. One I worked for a college bookstore management software developer that was trying to rewrite their whole point of sale software. They were simply crushed by tech debt. Any fix in the original software took months and the rewrite wasn't finished before the company was bought by a competitor. Better unit tests, better practices staying up to date, better CI all would have contributed to business success.
1. Juniors are no hired for C++ type roles. Employers want someone with 5+ years of experience, because just knowing the syntax is not enough. And training on the job is also not offered.
2. It pays shit in comparison.
3. Job positions are relatively scarce.
My actual niche is numerics (so writing numerical libraries and simulations), btw. I was really dismayed to see how shit the pay is.
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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'm really hoping the salaries for EE type roles start to match software as the grey beards start to retire and talent becomes scarce. We've got a legion of grads going into CS, but EE classes are a fraction of that. Despite that, software roles are often more than double the salary. Any role I go into as an EE/Embedded Systems engineer, I'm more often than not the youngest by 20-30 years. I wonder how the industry i…
There's lots of C++ programmers out there. But they're bottled up in FAANG, I think. So you have to be able to compete with that. Working at Google is on the whole a lot of C++. Major parts are moving to Go, certainly. But there's absolutely giant code-bases of pretty cleanly written C++ services, and most Googlers are quite proficient in it and there's whole teams at Google that work on improving C++ standards and t…
> All of this to say: if you want C++ programmers, you need to pay competitive enough rates to pull them away from there. I'd modify this to say "All of this to say: if you want programmers, you need to pay competitive rates." I worked in real estate for a while (as a software dev) and my boss, who was a realtor, always said "there's no house problem that price can't solve". The labor analogy for me is "there's no la…
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…
To be fair and assume competence: A lot of C++ programmers have been burned by adopting the latest and greatest bling, then having to port it to some backwards platform that doesn't have a recent compiler. Many of us use the legacy stuff when possible, because we know it works, there are already robust third party libraries that interoperate with the legacy stuff, and it is more likely to be portable than std::omfgbb…
So for that reason, I tended to write C+, which is pretty much C+, with some classes.
(What I mean by that is — comparatively speaking, C++ has a much larger set of things that you need to know, understand, and apply correctly to get the same kind of thing done relative to other languages.)
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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,…
MSFT was the same (at least the corner of it that I knew). We called it "C, with classes". I never apply to C++ jobs despite those 6 years of experience because I think my knowledge there is stuck in 1999 and I have no idea about the STL.
I have tried to focus on C++ during my career and I still haven't even touched ranges or needed about half the std algorithms.
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> Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby. But these are all implemented in C++ or C? Those aren't low-paying jobs.
No one is paying the implementers of those languages
Lol what? Yes they are. I literally work with a whole team of them! Teams at Goole, Apple, Mozilla, etc etc as well.
But now it's been supplanted by C#, Python, and JavaScript. And even with JavaScript, I'm constantly finding out stuff that was new a few years ago that makes the language better and easier to use.
I've taken a look at C++ recently and there's so much new stuff, it would almost be like learning it all over again. Hell, even C# would be like that if I were to compare it from when I first learned it to what it looks like now.