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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

#501

Post by forgotusername6 »

mooreds wrote: post #64
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #30

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…

160k puts you in the top 1% of UK earners. With bonus that job is comfortably in that bracket. UK salaries are no where near US levels.

Edit: my point is that a top 1% salary seems about right relatively for a tech lead position.

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

#502

Post by pyb »

rock_artist wrote: post #474

I really don't get this language thing. I do understand that having experience with a language is important as any developer trying out a new language has a learning curve between months to years depends of the needed scope. There are also "cpp lawyers" that you'll see in cpp conventions and are really "part" of the language. But... From my knowledge of the ones I admire as software engineers. It's not the language.…

Yes ! FAANG hire thousands of developers to write C++, even though their tech interviews are language-agnostic.

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

#504

Post by jeffreyrogers »

ayberk wrote: post #413
rychco wrote: post #209

I’ll offer a perspective unrelated to pay: It’s a pain to start learning C++, and even after you do, older devs will roast the hell out of your code because your book/tutorials of choice forgot to mention a crucial (in their opinion) feature that you absolutely should/shouldn’t use! Not to mention you’ve only programmed on Mac/Linux so far & windows is totally different, has a different compiler, different ways to in…

As someone who has been writing C++ at Google, this exactly. Despite all the tooling, guidelines and "internal magic", C++ is still an abomination. And no it has nothing to do with memory management, I actually do like C. I love how Eric Raymond describes it as "anti-compact", because, well, it really is. C++ as a whole should be deprecated -- and no new projects should use C++ (unless for some very odd and specific…

> C++ as a whole should be deprecated -- and no new projects should use C++ (unless for some very odd and specific reason).

It's quite a bit easier than Rust and no other popular language has its most important features (cross platform, interfaces with syscalls and other libraries easily, manual memory management possible, likely to be supported for a long time).

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

#505

Post by mschuster91 »

zabzonk wrote: post #92
mschuster91 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apart from finance, pay is lower than web languages. And finance is small. And it's blasted to hell with bureaucracy, red tape, toxic work environments and a reputation for having to deal with infrastructure best described as "fossilized". Banks have no one to blame but themselves (and maaaaybe a bit the sometimes insane requirements of financial regulation agencies) for being unable to attract programmers. At leas…

i have worked for several investment banks, and have always been highly paid, and had top-notch hardware and software to work with - i am sure that most competent banks realise that they are basically software hosts.

Investment banks aren't your typical consumer banks though - less red tape (because they're not consumer banks), less historical baggage (consumer banks have accounts that are sometimes well over a century old, which makes everything that touches account data incredibly sensitive as the data needs to be always consistent), and way more money available. There's a reason why a lot of advances in communication came from the needs of the investment banks, particularly specialized hedge funds / "quant banks".

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

#506

Post by jeffreyrogers »

rychco wrote: post #494
DeathArrow wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>C++ as a whole should be deprecated -- and no new projects should use C++ (unless for some very odd and specific reason). And what can be used instead of C++? C? If C was better, then C++ wouldn't have been invented. Rust? It's much more painful to use than C++. Zig? It's immature and has very low usage. Nim? Has very low user base. Julia? It isn't solving the same problems.

Mark Russinovich (of Sysinternals fame), thinks Rust should be the non-GC language of choice moving forward. https://twitter.com/markrussinovich/status/15719951172335042...

If people think C++ is hard to learn and attracts opinionated people boy are they in for a surprise when they start using Rust.

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

#507

Post by spoils19 »

aliqot wrote: post #245
rychco wrote: post #209

I’ll offer a perspective unrelated to pay: It’s a pain to start learning C++, and even after you do, older devs will roast the hell out of your code because your book/tutorials of choice forgot to mention a crucial (in their opinion) feature that you absolutely should/shouldn’t use! Not to mention you’ve only programmed on Mac/Linux so far & windows is totally different, has a different compiler, different ways to in…

> It’s a pain to start learning C++, and even after you do, older devs will roast the hell out of your code because your book/tutorials of choice forgot to mention a crucial Preach it!

This comment doesn't really align with the HN guidelines.

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

#509

Post by KptMarchewa »

chrisseaton wrote: post #159
cortesoft wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is paying the implementers of those languages

> 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.

https://discuss.python.org/t/official-list-of-core-developer...

>In my latest talk, I computed that we have 2 developers paid at full time to maintain Python: I am full time, Barry, Brett, Eric, Steve and Guido have 1 day per week if I understood correctly.

Now from what I understand situation is way better, but still - that's what it looked like just three years ago, when Python already had millions of people writing code in it.

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

#510

Post by mk89 »

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…

Interesting that I also am learning c++ since some months and I have a very similar feedback as you.

Just to add something:

> - 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

I don't know Rust, but they remind me of Scala traits. I guess it's conceptually the same, and Scala comes first :)

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

Somehow yes, but I think lots of cool things happened in 11 and 17. At least when I read the docs, it seems so. C++20 seems to have simplified and ported a lot of more modern features to the language, though. But 11 was a game changer from my understanding.

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

Tooling is indeed something that requires a sort of unofficial community decision to say "just start with this and this". That's so true! But that also goes against the main philosophy of C++ which makes it so super cool!

> - 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

Did you try project_options[0]? I recommend it to all newbies like me. Just set the "enable_developer_mode=true" and you get all that stuff for free.

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

In Clion you can cmd+click on the symbol and it leads to the header.

As a final note, another recommended resource is https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/

[0]: https://github.com/aminya/project_options

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