Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

efinancialcareers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 869 posts

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

#551

Post by josephg »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #506
rychco wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Learning rust is like cycling over 2 big hills. It’s exhausting and painful if you’re in any way out of shape.

Learning C++ is like cycling from SF to LA. It starts easy enough and every day you’re making a lot of satisfying progress. But you have so far to go because of all the features and quirks of the language.

It’s probably easier to get started learning C++. But it’s also much faster to finish learning rust and be able to read almost all rust code. (Pin still scares me though)

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

#552

Post by BrS96bVxXBLzf5B »

I could have been a talented C++ developer. Hell, I _am_ a good C++ developer. I should be, I've been doing it for a decade. Across a range of projects, from hardware to web backends to games and art.

But aside from a brief 3 years as a C developer (embedded hardware product) I've never been close to being one. Because when I was coming out of university seven years ago with a good CV and projects I could competently talk about, and I _could_ do the whiteboard segments, somehow I ... couldn't do them the way they wanted? And they, the very sparsely spread places with listings at the time, were offering no money for a new grad to somehow make their way across the country to interview, only to be offered a low salary (the C job I got was at the risk of a £180 train ticket three weeks before I would have had nowhere to live).

Now? I maintain a fleet of Wordpress sites for a digital agency for a modest £40k a year as the company's sole "someone who knows anything about Linux" person. Because my coworkers are lovely, my boss doesn't stress about anything and lets us flex our time and the clients are nice. Money is tight and definitely less than my skillset but going through the hoops of the "clever" side of the industry to be well paid and well stressed sounds daunting. There was no nurture for anyone not conforming to a very specific template which shows its face on the ranty side of Twitter.

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

#553

Post by littlestymaar »

DeathArrow wrote: post #488
ayberk wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). 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.

> Rust? It's much more painful to use than C++.

Unless you're doing something really highly specific to C++ (like Cuda for instance or deep integration with big C++ codebase), saying that rust is painful compared to C++ is laughable.

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

#554

Post by Zolomon »

gavinray wrote: post #482
jjtheblunt wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IE" ?

Yeah -- I thought it meant something along the lines of "for example" or "one instance being"?

id est (i.e.) = that is (literally "it is")

exempli gratia (e.g.) = for the sake of example, for example

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases

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

#555

Post by marcosdumay »

agumonkey wrote: post #531
marcosdumay wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sign that people inherently want to work on those hard problems.

I interpreted it as 'the market only cares about frontend sexiness'

Well, it's a sign that the people hiring developers and the developers want different things.

That saying that the client is always right exists for a reason.

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

#556

Post by forgotusername6 »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #512
forgotusername6 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But sheiks and oligarchs are buying all the real estate, so the cost of living is pretty similar.

In central London perhaps. But it's by no means important to live actually in London and work in London. Commuter culture is (or at least was) big. Many people commute from the surrounding 100+ miles by train each morning and pocket those London salaries while living in low cost of living areas.

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

#557

Post by cmollis »

cmollis wrote: post #544
dthul wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used both C++ and Rust extensively, I would say that it is easier to get something to compile in C++ than in Rust, but I find Rust overall much easier. C++ is really very complex, and even after more than a decade of using it there are so many things I don't know. With Rust I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp of most of the language.

I agree.. I've been writing in Rust for about 2 months and I find it to be a much easier surface than C++.. getting over the borrow checker isn't as bad as some make it out to be.. in fact, if it compiles it largely works.. you might be cloning one too many strings as a newbie, but you get the hang of it quickly.. when I wrote a lot of C++, I used a really small feature set.. but that was like 20 years ago.. now (app…

oh and the last time I wrote in C++, I was using gmake.. all those compiler and linker switches.. header and linker search paths.. ugh.. I felt like I was launching a rocket to the moon just getting some of that to build. don't miss that.. chasing down memory corruption in threads with gdb.. also painful. I get that C++ is much better now, but I haven't really used it in a long time so can't comment.

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

#558

Post by dragontamer »

cjg wrote: post #492
dragontamer wrote: post #400

> However, only 9.3% of respondents used Rust at all and only 8.8% did so professionally. C++, meanwhile, languished at 48%. I mean... it sounds like there's a lot of C++ programmers? I guess the problem is that "talented" C++ programmers are rare. But... "talented programmers" in general are rare.

It's a poorly written sentence. The key idea is: "Rust got an 87% approval rate in the "most loved" category of the Stack Overflow Survey. [...] C++, meanwhile, languished at 48%"

Thanks.

The number I was looking for was in a paragraph earlier, that I somehow missed when I made my post earlier

> So where have all the C++ developers gone? The Stack Overflow Survey 2022 reported almost a drop of almost two percentage points in respondents this past year using C++ (from 24.3% to 22.5%), even while the percentage of professional developers using it rose. The good news, though, is that 34.7% of respondents learning to code are using C++, placing it in the top 6 programming languages of that category.

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

#559

Post by cortesoft »

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.

Sorry, 'no one' is clearly an exaggeration. "Not enough to affect the job market" is a better way of putting it.

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

#560

Post by hardlianotion »

sqeaky wrote: post #158
wnolens wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Learning the language fundamentals robustly is the hard part, and everyone has incomplete knowledge. The C++ standard library is easy to learn for someone in your position. If you want to, start with something like iterator pairs and few trial problems, it will feel just like pointer arithmetic then the standard algorithms will be easy. I have tried to focus on C++ during my career and I still haven't even touched ra…

Ranges are a little frustrating, they aren't uniformly implemented across the commonly used compilers.
Post reply on HN