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The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

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

#461

Post by lamontcg »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23
deaddabe wrote: 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…

> Working fulltime in Rust now, but it's hard to find work there that isn't crypto-tainted.

There's a whole bunch of ex-C++ devs who have shifted to Rust in this thread.

The existing C++ jobs probably need to shift to Rust.

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

#462

Post by juancn »

Also, programming jobs in finance can be really boring.

There are a few neat technical challenges, but usually the subject matter is quite dry and fairly annoying (regulatory frameworks, etc.). Also there's usually a lot of red tape to get anything done.

I don't want to work for a financial company again if I can help it.

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

#463

Post by ornornor »

jahewson wrote: post #234
bombolo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes I used to work at a california company as c++ developer. There was no automated test whatsoever. QA department was just manually clicking things on a client that would connect to my c++ thing. When I wrote a couple of unit tests I got told off because I was wasting time not doing features.

Why waste time writing tests when you could be busy fixing bugs!?

So that’s what they teach in MBAs!

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

#464

Post by gavinray »

As someone who has been painfully self-teaching C++ for the last ~1.5 years on and on, these are my hangups:

- The features that make C++ decent are often found in C++ 20/23, for which there are woefully few resources

- Code taking advantage of coroutines and generators isn't commonplace yet, rare to find examples

- C++ 20 concepts are a near mirror copy of Rust Traits and enable composition that's an alternative to inheritance, again difficult to find examples of

- C++'s way of "implementing" interfaces (IE iterator) by having a magic defined set of type aliases and methods is not intuitive for me

- Writing code to control things like parallelization and thread scheduling that's portable across libraries is difficult. I think std:: executor is supposed to fix this but if I'm manually scheduling threads and I want to use IE oneTBB it's not obvious how to do this.

- Dependency and package management is a nightmare. Need to condense CMake + vcpkg into a Cargo like tool and make it a standard

- error messages are indecipherable. GCC 13-dev colors make this a bit better but human-written "ELI-5" errors succinctly explaining the problem and suggesting a solution (like Rust)

- flags like "-fsanitize=address,leak,undefined -fanalyzer -Wthread-safety -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=" should be baked in to a default "dev"/"debug" mode newbies shouldn't need to know/think about

- Profiling and instrumenting/monitoring should be a few CLI flags with nice UI visualizers (IE LLVM X-ray)

- I have to Google what headers cstd/std stuff comes from half the time

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

#465

Post by alxlaz »

larve wrote: post #259
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I find astounding. I wonder how much is just EEs looking at SWE resumes and going "why would I pay that much for this?! writing code isn't that hard" I definitely get that vibe from some of the local hw-eng companies. And they may not be wrong, but.. sorry, that's supply and demand. If I have to go write stupid NodeJS stuff to get paid decently, I guess I'll have to go do that.

At a previous job, the project lead (mechanical) assigned the embedded team (2 people) writing the firmwares for 3 boards (multi-element heater control, motor controller and move orchestrator with custom BLDC setup, multi-sensor temperature probes) in 2 weeks over christmas, because the junior EE said “I can control a motor with arduino in 30 minutes.” My only guess as to why such a disconnect from reality was possib…

Oh, no, this was super common. When the Arduino (and, soon afterwards, the Pi) were launched, for several years, about 20% of my time was spent explaining higher-ups why there's a very wide gap to cross between a junior's "I can control a motor with Arduino in 30 minutes" and "We can manufacture this and make a profit and you can safely ship it to customers".

Don't get me wrong, the Arduino is one of the best things that ever happened to engineering education. Back in college I had to save money for months to buy an entry-level development kit. But it made the non-technical part of my job exponentially harder.

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

#466

Post by dataking »

lamontcg wrote: post #461
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Working fulltime in Rust now, but it's hard to find work there that isn't crypto-tainted. There's a whole bunch of ex-C++ devs who have shifted to Rust in this thread. The existing C++ jobs probably need to shift to Rust.

Immunant offers no-crypto remote Rust work. Send resume to team@immunant.com

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

#467

Post by jjtheblunt »

gavinray wrote: post #464

As someone who has been painfully self-teaching C++ for the last ~1.5 years on and on, these are my hangups: - The features that make C++ decent are often found in C++ 20/23, for which there are woefully few resources - Code taking advantage of coroutines and generators isn't commonplace yet, rare to find examples - C++ 20 concepts are a near mirror copy of Rust Traits and enable composition that's an alternative to…

"IE" ?

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

#469

Post by TheCoelacanth »

mywittyname wrote: post #371
mooreds wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The labor analogy for me is "there's no labor shortage that salary can't solve". Assuming the labor you need is fungible. For a sandwich shop, raising pay will probably solve a labor shortage. But even salaries of $10,000,000 a year won't produce more surgeons. It might inspire more people to get into the pipeline, but that's a 10-15 year lag.

It will solve the shortage by allocating labor to the most economically valuable uses.

If you can't find developers at the price you can afford to pay, then make do with fewer devs, raise your prices or go out of business. The market doesn't owe it to you to make your business model profitable.

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