The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/11/why-is-there-a-drought-in-the-talent-pool-for-c-developers

by pjmlp • 4 years ago

383 847 4 years ago

efinancialcareers.com

Kelteseth2• 4 years ago

People are seemingly scared away from the language by a terrible stigma: the notion that it is a legacy program.

My personal experience: Universities (in Germany) simply stopped teaching C++. Most of it is now Python or C#.

stingraycharles• 4 years ago

Did they?

I know that when I did my CS in early 2000s, they didn’t even teach a specific language — you were expected to pick one up yourself in your own time.

Perhaps it’s just part of a bigger zeitgeist that people just care less about C++ than they did before, faster than the actual job pool is decreasing?

LeanderK• 4 years ago

That hasn't changed, you are still expected to pick one up yourself except (for me) Java, the first and only language that really got "taught". Maybe that was C++ a few decades ago or something. We had to do a little bit of C for some system programming lecture.

zaphar• 4 years ago

I mean, I don't think it's a legacy language at all. But I do think it's a minefield of annoying problems with no two codebases speaking the same subeset of C++ evolved to work around those annoying problems.

All told I would fine it more frustrating to work in C++ than enjoyable.

soinus3• 4 years ago

Would not say it's true at least for robotics related fields. I personally taught C++ some years ago and the new guys have taken over since, adopting and improving on my course. There are many specializations where C++ is still a must.

bodhiandphysics4• 4 years ago

Yes... it’s the lingua franca of graphics and scientific computation (including low level ML)

lumost3• 4 years ago

Having recently learned C++/C.. I don't see why it would be taught as a first language outside of specializations. The gains from C/C++ coding are vastly outweighed by the costs. The reality is that there is no good, agreed upon standard in C++ for how to manage memory... how would you teach this to junior engineers at university?

UltraViolence3• 4 years ago

new / delete?

P5fRxh5kUvp2th7• 4 years ago

I learned programming in the 90's using C++.

When someone expresses this intent I always ask the same question. Am I a supergenius or are you mistaken?

soinus3• 4 years ago

But there is! Use local variables and value semantics. Use references to borrow stuff. Never touch new or delete. Use smart pointers when need an owning pointer (rare). Anything beyond that: ask next in seniority to supervise. That should be enough to live a happy C++ life for a junior.

WhiteDawn• 4 years ago

I'm always conflicted with this.

My gut says any new student should start with an interpreted language like Python or JS/TypeScript. As that gets you to running code, and core concepts like variables, loops and if statements in little to no time.

However, there is value in learning some of the under the hood concepts such as pointers, structs, memory layout, endianess, pass by reference, compilers etc.

I don't think schools need to teach employable C/C++ skills, but C/C++ is a great language to play with and experience these core concepts.

However I'm not sure if the value in learning these concepts are real, or it's just my own interests/nostalgia. You can have a successful career in this industry without having to manage a single byte of memory, and it arguably makes sense to accept abstractions at their face value so you can focus on what builds your skills/product.

__turbobrew__• 4 years ago

I definitely would not advocate teaching students C++.

C on the other hand is a relatively compact language and is the lingua franca of operating systems and shared libraries.

insanitybit2• 4 years ago

Having learned C/C++ as my first languages I can say I'm quite glad for it. I was able to learn so fucking much.

1. Object oriented programming, complete with inheritance and virtual dispatch

2. Pure Functional Programming, lambdas, const correctness, template metaprogramming

3. Type system fuckery - the things you can do in C++'s TMP is insane. Both nominal and duck typing in the language.

4. Hardware - I watched so many talks on how CPUs work that explained things via C/C++. I learned about tools like valgrind and cachegrind, how to profile code, etc.

5. Security - The original reason I wanted to learn them, to understand how to exploit C and C++ programs and their common vulnerabilities

6. Data structures - C++ is awesome for building data structures from scratch and understanding their low level semantics

I don't want to write them professionally, but learning them was massively helpful, with skills propagating through every other language I've used.

hardware2win3• 4 years ago

And thats right choice

Why students should waste their sacre time on mess of c or cpp world where even basic things may be crazy like strings

Stop wasting peoples time on subpar technology and let them learn algorithms, ds and foundational knowledge instead of quirks and pain

Go, python, c#, etc. are way better for students

Later teach them Rust

Barrin92• 4 years ago

Not surprised to see Python but when I went to uni in Germany 10 years ago Java absolutely seemed to dominate as a teaching language (and on the job market). Has C# gained ground?

Kelteseth2• 4 years ago

Yes, Java is still big. Python is popular because it is a synonym for machine learning at this point. C# mostly because of Unity3d is the preferred game engine.

tannhaeuser• 4 years ago

A recent curriculum of languages taught at a German TU I skimmed over includes C, C++, and Haskell. Can't help but agree with that choice: C gives you understanding of low level operations and appreciation of higher level concepts such as GC and/or verification etc. while Haskell lets you experiment with functional and logic idioms, type theory, DSLs, etc. Starting with Java or C# might be ok for training and getting a job, but would be unsuitable for foundational education IMO.

lordleft• 4 years ago

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.

psychlops• 4 years ago

Indeed, if they can get one of the few jobs that frees up every few years.

ryandrake6• 4 years ago

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.

c54• 4 years ago

Lmao “read from a monitor” as instead of from whatever fancy ARVR dev environments we’ll be on in 15 years?

3pt141593• 4 years ago

But why?

Why not be an proficient Python developer and make the same compensation[0] with better docs, better libraries, better codebases, no compilation annoyances[1], easier to read code, and fewer not-defined-by-the-spec weirdness?

C++ would have to pay 4x what Python pays for me to even consider doing it again. It literally makes me sad when I write software in it. Especially the libraries.

[0] Mid-six digits as an IC is very doable in North America.

[1] If you want to count the occasional Cython thing, fine. Almost no compilation annoyances.

eddsh19944• 4 years ago

Mid-six digits as an IC is very doable in North America.

No, it's not. Some people who read this comment probably do make that, and it's great, but it's not the norm. You have to be exceptional to get there.

rr8082• 4 years ago

I switched from C++ because the type of work is typically boring. Its either system level stuff, or HFT, usually some market data system or similar. Not to mention its likely a big old system with legacy code base.

Seeing the salaries now I kinda regret switching out, but the companies and business problems you get in Python & Java are much more interesting.

antegamisou4• 4 years ago

the type of work is typically boring.

May be a personal taste thing but graphics programming, computer vision, scientific computing, robotics and even some embedded systems work is far from boring imo.

But certainly the above are niche fields in a market where software engineering is almost always limited to webdev.

jbluepolarbear3• 4 years ago

As a game developer I agree that a lot of C++ work can be really fun, but this less than 10% of what C++ is used for. More so you have databases, non-robotic embedded work, crypto (ew), systems work, etc. And they all pay terrible; except financial, but that’s the most boring of all C++ work.

gridspy18• 4 years ago

Each of the industries you mention has a tech stack which must remain modern. That means that new work will migrate to the language easiest to do the work and find workers.

It's gonna migrate away from C++ if C++ becomes "legacy."

Embedded systems work is perhaps the exception - since there will be old hardware in the field. But firmware parts go out of production within 2-10 years and so new drivers require creation and new features encourage a migration to a whole new system.

volkk• 4 years ago

interesting. i've always found that the basic CRUD apps that most python jobs end up being are far more boring than HFT or systems level

codegladiator• 4 years ago

The grass on the other side

soinus3• 4 years ago

As a personal anecdote, all of my jobs were actually very interesting with lots of interesting design problems spanning from low level systems to very high level design decisions. Granted I worked in automotive and later in AR and have been lucky enough to be at the start of some projects, but there definitely are interesting projects for C++ out there.

zerr• 4 years ago

There is a sweet spot - desktop/GUI applications, but it's getting smaller and smaller, unfortunately.

deaddabe2• 4 years ago

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 Europe). Maybe as the old timers retire, job offers will align? Who knows.

jart• 4 years ago

Isn't it common for C++ devs in finance to make seven figure salaries?

sentinalien3• 4 years ago

Not really no, 7 figure roles are few and far between

hnews_account_1• 4 years ago

There are no 7 figure dev roles in finance except in very select hedge funds where one time bonuses in 5 or 6 years may be that large. 6 figure is the norm. At 7 figures, you’re likely in management and not working on technical details.

kevstev3• 4 years ago

Not at all. This is a complete falsehood spread most likely by the financial companies themselves. I worked at Investment Banks for many years, doing low level C/C++ type stuff in various flavors of algorithmic trading and high frequency trading. I left in 2014, because I got an offer for 40% more just doing pure web stuff in Javascript. In the years since I have more than quadrupled my TC, and my neighbor, who is essentially sitting in the seat I sat in when I was working in finance, in that period has upped his comp by maybe 40%.

And on top of that, I rarely log in after hours or on a weekend. In finance, my real breaking point came because there was just an absolute refusal to architect to be able to make changes during market hours, which are essentially 9-6 these days- most securities have a big enough of an extended session that you can't push changes until after. Any significant network changes, host swaps, etc... all had to be done on the weekends. In the web world, you had to bake the ability to make changes on the fly from the very get go, there is no off-time when there is no traffic. And in my last team, we actually avoided pushing changes with any significant risk on Fridays, because if something really bad did happen, it was going to be very hard to get ahold of the right people to diagnose and fix it...

22SAS7• 4 years ago

No. I work in HFT and this happens in only two cases:

1. At top-tier firms like HRT, Citadel Securities, Jump, TGS, RenTech; there are a decent amount of C++ devs making 7-figures. In many cases, it may depend on how profitable their desk is.

2. At most other firms (mine included), only very senior devs are making 7-figures. These are people managing or overseeing many teams.

This BS that HFT C++ devs make craptons of money has been spread by tech bros and college kids, who have never worked in HFT.

cmrdporcupine8• 4 years ago

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.

The problem is I really like writing C++ (and Rust, etc.)! So I'm cultivating other "systems programming" type career paths; DB internals, have always fascinated me, so I'm trying that direction. Working fulltime in Rust now, but it's hard to find work there that isn't crypto-tainted.

Other people have pointed out that lower pay in embedded has to do with the influence of EE salaries. Which are sadly lower than they rightfully should be.

antegamisou4• 4 years ago

You may also look into Kernel Programming for a lucrative systems programming career. It is more C and low-level oriented though.

synergy204• 4 years ago

system programming is a tough and low reward path indeed, be it in c/c++ or whatever.

embedded/EE is worse.

unless you made into the big few(google,amazon,meta,apple,microsoft,...), salary will plummet by half in general, or even more.

Aromasin2• 4 years ago

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 in the West is going to survive it, beyond hiring contractors from India/South Asia.

sqeaky12• 4 years ago

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.

agumonkey3• 4 years ago

Isn't this a sign of a problem ? where important domains with hard problems pay few .. while some dubious applications are throwing money on css plumbers ?

jcelerier• 4 years ago

Yes, the embedded space pays terrible, and the employers don't seem great on the whole.

in europe c++ pay is in general ridiculously bad, I got some job ads this morning. Senior job in real-time trading in C++ in Paris, multithreading and linux knowledge, english first: 55-75k. Embedded senior C++ FPGA engineer in paris: 45k-65k. No bonus in either position. thanks but no thanks

NegativeLatency• 4 years ago

My local bus/transit agency was hiring an embedded programmer a couple of years ago and while I thought it would be fun to do embedded stuff and get to work on busses/trains (!) the pay was like half my web dev salary. (Granted there is a pension but it's not that good)

danuker3• 4 years ago

crypto-tainted

If the government did its job and we had sound money, and taxation were explicit instead of this wacky adjustable-and-unpredictable-devaluation that is inflation, there would be no need for cryptocurrency.

MontyCarloHall• 4 years ago

EE salaries are sadly lower than they rightfully should be.

Profit margins of an EE will almost always be lower than profit margins of a software engineer. A team of software engineers can quickly scale to selling to millions of users (and collect nearly 100% of the resulting revenue as pure profit), whereas a team of EE's cannot a) scale their customer base as quickly, since scaling up manufacturing takes time and b) realize a profit anywhere close to 100% of revenue, since much of their revenue goes towards manufacturing and distribution costs.

In other words, the marginal cost of selling one unit of a physical product is always nonzero, whereas the marginal cost of selling one unit of software is often (very close to) zero. That differential goes towards higher salaries for the software engineer.

wutbrodo• 4 years ago

I feel almost exactly the same way as you. I've flitted around the research/applied research boundary for ML for the last decade+, so I write plenty of Python. I enjoy the way Python gets out of my way so I can focus on interesting research problems. But the actual act of writing code in C++ is so much more fun, once you get good enough at it that the footguns don't trip you up.

The embedded AI space is a pretty good place to make money writing C++. I was in autonomous vehicles for a bit. It didn't really interrupt my post-Google compensation trajectory, and I got to write performance- and safety-critical C++

lamontcg• 4 years ago

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.

synergy204• 4 years ago

I'm also surprised c++ is paid less than python and javascript these days, embedded c/c++ jobs are also paid less which requires years of experience to get better at.

bluetomcat• 4 years ago

C++ shops are a diverse beast. There's the legacy MFC desktop app from 1999 dentists are using to upload dental imagery, there are high-profile Windows applications and games, there are also cutting-edge ML, computer vision and simulation-related domains.

mhfu2• 4 years ago

Yep. I build glorified CRUD apps in NodeJS + React, my friend works on some embedded C++ stuff.

- My working hours are way more flexible. I pretty much only have to attend meetings which are rare, so I can basically work whenever I want during the day. That means that I can go to the dentist and stuff like that without taking the day off. She has pretty strict hours.

- I can work from anywhere, only requirement is decent internet connection. She has to go to the office because that's the only way she can actually test the code she writes for physical devices.

- My salary is basically double of what my friend makes.

She's currently learning JS so she can just move into web space. If someone can choose between easier job with much better salary, benefits and working conditions, they will do that without thinking, unless they reeeeeally like C++.

colinjoy• 4 years ago

Probably less related to C++ as a language and more so an "embedded" issue or down to the specific industry that your friend is in.

E.g., there are hundreds of C++ devs at my company that have the same work from home options and flexible hours as their frontend peers. So these jobs exist.

electrondood• 4 years ago

glorified CRUD apps

Why is API design/backend engineering the only software discipline that gets maligned like this? These are bread-and-butter operations. I don't mean to attack you, just noting that I never hear anyone talk about mobile development in the same way, for example.

mschuster912• 4 years ago

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 least in Germany, the fintechs have never had much trouble attracting developers... so it's not the finance industry itself, here in Germany it is definitely a culture problem in the established banks that historically have treated IT purely as a cost center instead of the integral part of business they are.

zabzonk11• 4 years ago

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.

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

Employees may be leaving the embedded space

Embedded opportunities have been slowly shrinking for years. For whatever combination of reasons, a lot of employers think that embedded work is easy or otherwise doesn’t require a large budget.

It’s increasingly bizarre to get a well-designed IoT device with a very polished mobile app and web UI, then struggle with hardware factory resets and firmware upgrades because the embedded side of the product didn’t get the same level of attention.

It’s like embedded somehow became an afterthought in the industry. Perhaps because it’s the only part of the system that doesn’t have a highly polished UI layered on top of it? Over the past decade I’ve witnessed multiple companies over focus on anything that goes well into slide decks (UX mock-ups, animations, etc.) or generates vanity metrics (number of backend servers, requests per second to the cloud) while ignoring anything that doesn’t have a visual pop to it (embedded firmware)

Jtsummers2• 4 years ago

"Programming is just typing" was a typical management refrain when I was in the embedded field (more properly, now I'm adjacent to it). It was frustrating. Computer scientists and programmers aren't Real(tm) Engineers so they don't deserve as much money. They can't be in charge because you can't have engineers answering to non-engineers (ie, very few leads let alone managers coming from the software side). Which leads to a culture that's overly hardware centric with insufficient leadership/management understanding of what software actually entails.

Also, "This doesn't meet the current requirements, fix it with software!" The best one was when the case wasn't waterproof... How the fuck is software supposed to fix that? They literally expected the software team to work magic. A lot of pushback got that requirement kicked back over to the mechanical engineering team to address, but it took months. Moronic.

ryandrake6• 4 years ago

Many hardware companies still see software as just another line item on the BOM: Like a screw or a gasket. It's something you build cheaply or buy from a supplier and sprinkle it on the product somewhere on the assembly line. These hardware companies have no concept of typical measures of software quality, building an ecosystem, release management, sometimes even no concept of source control. They tell an overworked embedded software engineer: "Go build something that barely meets these requirements, ship it, and then throw the scrap away." like metal shavings from their CNC machine.

eschneider• 4 years ago

Yeah, I sorta specialize in that whole IoT firmware update/fleet monitoring/make sure everything at the edge runs smoothly end of things, and if you find a company that realizes that this is something that MUST work smoothly if they're going to scale, then it's a very sweet place to be. Even better, that sorta work combines low-level C++ with lots of back-end web service work, so you're never 'just' a C++ programmer.

larve4• 4 years ago

One thing I came to see working in both web and embedded for two decades now: a lot of embedded developers often miss the “product” side of what they are building. This probably doesn’t explain the lower pay, but it might be a reason why embedded overall doesn’t get the recognition it deserves: the embedded engineers don’t know how to communicate their value / provide more value to the business.

This is becoming increasingly important as you well note, where devices are all connected, and things like setup and updating and connectivity are crucial. Designing not only a robust, but a user-friendly firmware update process is actually a lot more work than just building a bootloader: you need to communicate to the user, in realtime, what is going on. Cancelling an action needs to be immediate and provide feedback on the process of the cancelling. Error handling needs to provide useful information, and probably a special UX.

These do need to be factored into the embedded software right from the start, because they significantly increase the complexity, and it’s extremely easy for management to miss how crucial that part is. I keep a few horrible chinese consumer electronics devices on hand (webcam, mp3 player, mobile phone) to show what I mean. The only difference between an ipod touch and a noname mp3 player with touchscreen is… the software.

Having to press 3 inaccessible buttons, connect a USB volume named “NO NAME”, have it hang for 2 minutes when unmounting, then show a black screen for 3 more minutes, before showing … that it didn’t update, vs a smoothly progressing update progress bar showing the steps, the devices showing up in my online dashboard as soon as it reboots, that’s what my value as an embedded engineer is.

bsder2• 4 years ago

It’s increasingly bizarre to get a well-designed IoT device with a very polished mobile app and web UI, then struggle with hardware factory resets and firmware upgrades because the embedded side of the product didn’t get the same level of attention.

Why? The issue is that you have to actually ... you know ... PLAN when you have an embedded device.

You can churn the app and the web and the backend infinitely so there is no penalty for doing so. If you take that attitude and apply it to embedded you wind up with an expensive pile of scrap.

thewebcount• 4 years ago

There was a time in the late 90s/early 2000s where this happened to driver development on the (Classic) Mac. Companies would make some USB device and get a reasonable driver made for Windows (I assume - I wasn't using Windows at the time). Then they would say, "Well, MacOS is 10% the market of Windows, so we'll pay 1/10th for someone to develop a driver for this." But it turned out that USB worked completely differently on the Mac from how it did on Windows, so none of the Windows code was relevant at all for the Mac devs. They would either get what they paid for (which was terrible for users) or they would not get a Mac driver. This is around the time I stopped buying any device that required installing a driver. Many of these devices didn't really need one because they were regular USB-spec devices (keyboards, scanners, etc.) To this day, I will not install a driver for a fucking mouse. Why would that be required?

zabzonk11• 4 years ago

a few issues here - c++ is not used that widely in embedded (most prefer c or a small c++ subset). and ruby? i can't remember the last time i saw a post about ruby here. and finance is huge.

stu2b50• 4 years ago

Ruby still has relevance as it was the lingua franca of the 2010s ish startup scene. These days those startups have become veritable big tech companies in their own right - Stripe, Uber, AirBnB, and so forth. While many of those companies have started integrating other languages they still have massive legacy ruby codebases and demand then for ruby engineers.

the_only_law• 4 years ago

And it seems like most of the jobs in the domains where C++ is common want established domain experts and maybe a handful of new people coming in through university pipelines.

heinekan• 4 years ago

Can confirm the interest of workers leaving the embedded space.

I am a embedded C++ engineer and it feels like I’m watching all my friends who work building web apps have fun on the other side.

- More companies/job openings

- Higher salaries

- Flexible working

- More interesting technology/problems

ojl• 4 years ago

I don’t know, I guess it depends on location and such. I work as a C++ dev with computer vision related stuff. I have an ok salary and very flexible working conditions. And I haven’t seen any web related jobs in my region which seem technologically more interesting.

You are correct about number of job openings though..

brrrrrm• 4 years ago

You've presented a false dichotomy between "web" and "embedded systems".

C++ fuels the engines behind Python and JavaScript. Databases, compilers, machine learning libraries: all C++ and actively maintained.

_aavaa_• 4 years ago

But what’s the ratio of people work implementing and maintaining these things at the C++ layer versus those using the python layer?

tyingq• 4 years ago

I would guess Microsoft's push for C#/.Net is affecting this as well.

Gibbon12• 4 years ago

There are a lot of projects written in C++/Python/NodeJS/Go/Ruby that really should be written in C#/.net.

chrisseaton4• 4 years ago

Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby.

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

cortesoft2• 4 years ago

No one is paying the implementers of those languages

fiedzia3• 4 years ago

But these are all implemented in C++ or C?

Mostly, but Rust is increasingly replacing them.

maxloh4• 4 years ago

But most implementors are hired by Big Techs, which means you have to be really good to get a decent job with C++.

In the meantime, JavaScript and Python is a lot easier to work with, with a higher salary.

UncleOxidant• 4 years ago

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.

ativzzz5• 4 years ago

Yup and as we know we don't get paid based on the difficulty of the problem we are solving.

BeetleB3• 4 years ago

Yes - I used to program in C++, and left it for another job. 2 years later, when looking for other opportunities, I realized how much of the small details in C++ I'd forgotten, and didn't want to go back to all those minutiae unless it paid more.

It's a real relief to drop that cognitive load.

spamizbad• 4 years ago

I'm about a decade removed from a C++ shop and I disagree with this.

I've found C++ shops have "lower" standards for C++ developers. I'm putting "lower" in quotes here because I'm talking relative skill within a given language. It just seems way more common in C++ shops to have situations where "20% of the developers do 80% of the work". This isn't to say there's dead weight in Python/Ruby shops, but my experience in the C++ world was there was always a small group of developers doing most of the work and this is considered normal whereas the same situation in a Python/Ruby shop would be a major crisis.

Despite the demand, if you're a low output Python/Ruby dev you'll likely struggle to hold a career together; hiring will be a slog and you'll get squeezed out of orgs with PIPs every 6 months. The same low output C++ developer could probably stay gainfully employed once hired.

Hopefully this fact might encourage others to pursue C/C++ jobs. There is zero expectations towards being a "rockstar" - if you know the fundamentals and can plod through work at whatever pace you're comfortable with there's probably a job out there for you.

jonnycoder2• 4 years ago

I've gone from Python to embedded C++ recently and this is my experience, although I would add that C++ devs know a lot more at the lower level of abstraction such as Linux, toolchains, etc which makes them seem like wizards. Outside of embedded, a good Python or NodeJS engineer has opportunities to do more automation and value added activities such as CI/CD, test automation, devops, etc.

analognoise2• 4 years ago

I've discovered this and am trying to move into pretty much anything web related.

scruple2• 4 years ago

I left embedded for web about a decade ago and doubled my salary overnight while taking on a role that was less demanding. My experience from embedded gave me an advantage over colleagues, specifically with regards to troubleshooting systems and performance problems, (edit) and the ability to read / understand the C/C++ code that so many of these languages, their standard libraries, their extensions, etc., are implemented in, that has carried forward to this day.

I'd love to go back to embedded but I can't cut my salary in half to do it.

maxloh4• 4 years ago

Interpreted languages are also more flexible and easier to work with.

clum• 4 years ago

It's also the companies that use C++ in my market (Embedded, Germany): They are either "old" industries (cars, car-parts, industrial machines, military equipment, embedded stuff) or consultancies working for these companies. Very few of them have any real flexibility nor do they care about their employees' wishes much. I have been looking for a 20h/week remote job (I have 5+ YOE) in this field for a few months and basically all offers were crap in one way or another. Negotiating your contract beyond salary and vacation days is extremely non-standard. Working remote is not a thing - best you can do is work from home, often with clauses allowing them to cancel this agreement any time, or with very weird restrictions around your workplace. There is tons of red tape in every single bigger company. I'm still deciding between two offers, but it is very likely I will leave the C++ Embedded field and work in the python market in the future.

I am at a bit of a loss here. On the one hand these very companies cry publicly about a lack of skilled workers, on the other hand you have to fight hard to get your market price and they will not budge on downright immoral clauses (such as not getting paid for x amount of overtime per week) or remote work.

FredPret2• 4 years ago

It’s survival of the fittest in the market and sounds like these companies aren’t it

Sakos• 4 years ago

Sounds like a completely different world from where I work in Cologne. We're having trouble finding good Java developers, so we're basically dropping requirements left and right. We'll even interview people without a resume and we're far more flexible on remote work than we are in the rest of the company.

germandiago17• 4 years ago

Immoral clause sounds to me like too much. If conditions are bad, just leave. They will have to change them eventually, that's it.

lazypenguin2• 4 years ago

I left my last job which was entirely C++ because of lower wages compared to the industry and low upside in wage growth potential. While I enjoy the lower level nature of that kind of work why stay somewhere solving hard C++ problems when I can go do some easier web backend stuff somewhere else making 15% more or become a kubernetes expert and break into new pay band all together?

DeathArrow13• 4 years ago

solving hard C++ problems when I can go do some easier web backend stuff

As guy who worked with both C++ and backend I would assume you don't have much experience if you say one is harder than the other. Different beasts, different problems to solve, complexity lies in different parts.

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

Isn't that nuts? It basically comes down to, if you're further from management, you're not valued.

Oh, you can change the color of the button on my website? 200k/year!

You eke out maximum performance from poorly documented devices and apis using obscure toolchains and custom built linux kernels to run on small chips that are the backbone of our business? 75k/year!

jasmer2• 4 years ago

It's a resonant issue: if everyone is taught Python, it's the tool they will reach for.

And of course, Python is much more broadly applicable.

I don't like to develop in C++ because it's a tiresome mess of issues that don't exist in modern languages.

I don't care about the newer variations or whatever, I still can't do basic things or pull in a library to do it 20 years later so no thanks.

That said - it's not going to go away.

While Rust is nice, I just don't see it replacing C/C++ for a long time due to abi incompatibility etc..

C++ does require more experience, and it needs to pay well or companies won't get the talent.

thedracle3• 4 years ago

I'm really surprised at how stable and widely supported Rust's FFI is.

I have several C++ projects that integrate a portion written in Rust, where the Rust project produces a .a file that is ultimately linked with clang into a larger C++ project.

I definitely agree Rust has a long road to adoption in embedded/low level systems, and particularly areas with custom compilers/toolchains that rely heavily on system specific undefined behavior.

But it's a lot closer than I had thought it was a year or so ago.

nprateem• 4 years ago

And C++ is difficult & confusing. Other more modern languages have easier toolchains and fewer gotchas.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

Because Python pays more.

In the extremely underpaid start-up world?

C, Java, C++, Kotlin, Swift, etc - IIUC pay MUCH better and are more in demand at companies where you really make good money as an engineer.

DeathArrow13• 4 years ago

Not according to latest developer survey by Stack Overflow.

goalieca3• 4 years ago

In the past few years I’ve discussed salaries with dozens of companies as a staff level IC. C++ companies pay significantly less even if the work is far more specialized and challenging. The real money is in “Cloud + python/golang”.

bsder2• 4 years ago

Employees may be leaving the embedded space (and C++) for web tech because of this.

It's remote work.

Remote work is basically forcing ALL software shops to pay more money. If you're smart enough to program C++, you can program ANYTHING.

Let's stop calling it a labor shortage and call it what it really is--a salary shortage.

galangalalgol2• 4 years ago

Yeah, but it is kind of unique in that the skillset is in demand for two different types of business, and one has a drastically higher profitability and demand for people. That by itself isn't that unique, there are any number of jobs that don't exist because the qualifications would make employees too expensive. But we actually rely on this stuff for our modern world, we need these jobs to exist, but we won't pay for it, so you only get those who love the work, and those who are too bad to do anything else. So far, that has been enough. Teachers, Nurses, and Vets are similar, so I don't guess it really is that unique. And we are seeing shortages in all of those too.

kaylynb• 4 years ago

This has been my experience in the US. C++ is my favorite language. I learned programming using it in the mid nineties. I still keep up with developments although I wouldn't consider myself the most skilled with it anymore.

The only job I've ever had that used it was a civil engineering company in a small city in the deep south, and it was mostly just C. The pay was good for the area, but nothing spectacular.

I moved to Seattle and the only C++ jobs were at FAANGs, and only a small portion of jobs at those companies. I worked at two FAANGs and only used Java and C#. I learned frontend web stacks largely due to job flexibility and it almost always pays the best vs amount of stress/work needed to put in.

Yeah I could probably write C++ at <insert FAANG> for 2x the salary but I'd also have to work 80h work weeks and deal with FAANG internal politics and sabotage from coworkers, depending on FAANG and which variation of "don't call it stack ranking" they use this year.

On the other hand I can use TypeScript and work from my home office. I've been considering moving back to the south just because much lower living expenses, family, and availability of remote work for web stacks. I can't get that with C++.

speby2• 4 years ago

I've wondered why embedded tends to pay lower. C++ (and C) tend to be 'harder' languages for the average mainstream developer, particularly web developers. I guess I expect embedded jobs to pay more, yet they don't and like you said, pay less.

But why is that?

Leherenn• 4 years ago

In embedded you sell hardware, with web you sell software. Software scales a lot more than hardware, thus more revenues per employee.

thedracle3• 4 years ago

I started as an embedded software engineer in the early 90's, and at the time there were lots of well paying jobs compared to other software engineering diciplines.

In the 2ks/10's, at least in my area, embedded jobs dried up. Mobile development produced a lot of very high performance SoCs that were cheap, and had high quality already developed middleware layers (Android for instance). They sort of conquered a lot of the embedded media processing space I was an expert in.

As a result I jumped ship to mobile, but it was much higher level programming far away from the SoC, and most of the lower level code was being written in China/South Korea.

This basically meant for the engineers that weren't able to shift, they basically weren't scouting around for, or finding other jobs (in general).

So even though there is a small pool of engineers with these skills, a lot of people left the embedded space at a time when some of those jobs are starting to shift back, leaving a shortfall, but also a pay gap.

melony• 4 years ago

Said finance companies are also at fault. They are not willing to scale up their operations. They demand only the creme de la creme, but there’s simply not enough incentive to do C++ when the compensation is so bimodal.

eklitzke• 4 years ago

This might be true for embedded C++ programmers, but it's not true at FAANG or finance companies, which accounts for a lot of C++ programmers. I'm in San Francisco and I wrote mostly Python/Go at web companies for the first 10 or so years of my career, and write C++ at a FAANG now. I'm getting paid significantly more now than I was before. At my previous job where I was writing C++ I was making $286k in cash ($220k base salary + 30% bonus target) plus generous stock compensation. Most people writing Python, Javascript, or Ruby are not getting paid that much in cash even if they're working at a unicorn startup in SF.

opportune2• 4 years ago

A lot of C++ jobs are at FAANG companies. At least at the ones I’ve worked, nothing serious (ie in prod) is implemented in Python or Ruby. It’s Java for stuff that doesn’t need to be fast, C++ for stuff that needs to be fast, and Go for random stuff where people were able to shoehorn it in.

I think the problem is more that asking someone to accept low pay to work in C++ (one of the hardest languages to be productive in) doesn’t make any sense. If I’m good at software and know C++ I’ll work at a FAANG, AI company, self driving, or HFT/Hedge Fund for 3x-10x what a random C++ embedded role would pay.

shams93• 4 years ago

I've seen that too, ironic since most scripting languages are written in c++, but languages such as go and rust are now self-hosted so there's finally meaningful aloternatives to either c++ or java/c# (in the case of go).

intelVISA6• 4 years ago

The life hack here is to pick up a handful of web jobs and keep C++ for leisure.

benttoothpaste• 4 years ago

My last C++ job was for a robotics company a few years ago (pre pandemic). The job was not very “embedded”, but quite challenging - processing noisy images from lidars, etc. I worked 60 hour weeks and my salary was 80k or so. Then I realized I can get twice as much just writing Python micro services. So I became a Python developer instead. Much less stress and a lot more free time too.

psyclobe• 4 years ago

I'm not dead yet!!

a-dub• 4 years ago

i don't think the use cases for c and c++ have changed all that much in the last decade.

the sheer quantity of application stuff that has been written in very high level languages has.

rpep• 4 years ago

I worked in C++ in the UK for a number of years and interviewed for a couple of positions like these. The main reason I didn't want to work for a financial company is that they insist on high number of working hours and being located in-person in London.

When I studied Physics, I did 2 years (4 semesters) of C++. Nowadays, nobody would do that, you'd learn Python by default.

JonChesterfield• 4 years ago

Trading is struggling to find great C++ devs because they're all obsessed with working from London.

dsign• 4 years ago

The last time I searched for jobs, there were two competing automotive makers among the prospective employers. The one that offered the C++ position for programming Lidar systems offered a lower salary than the one that just wanted a generalist to wrangle scripts and systems. Beats me.

bluedino• 4 years ago

I found it equally hilarious that (at the last place I was) the Python devops jobs paid 50% more than the core developers of the company's core product.

ch4s3• 4 years ago

I wonder if this partially explains some of the issues car manufacturers are having with LIDAR systems, other than the inherent difficulty of course.

hpcjoe• 4 years ago

Auto companies notoriously pay their people poorly. They are losing many talented engineers as a result. I know quite a few in the industry here in Michigan. The engineers who remain at the autos, are blown away by the salaries their former colleagues are getting from SV companies.

I was mentoring a EE who wanted to up his game. He wanted to get into programming, and I pointed out that Python, C++, etc. are in demand at many companies right now. I asked him for his salary range, and for a 50+ year old engineer with 20 years of experience, it was pretty awful. Though, completely normal for the autos and their suppliers.

bsenftner• 4 years ago

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.

Quarrelsome• 4 years ago

I wouldn't take that personally. In my experience most recruiters are complete idiots. The vast majority of recruitment agencies in my geography (UK) just employ children for recruitment roles and as such all their understanding of tech is almost entirely cargo cult and buzzword driven. This is why every tech CV that goes to a recruiter should have a "buzzword page" so they can play pairs, feel like they're adding value and get out of your way.

When a recruiter is like that then their function is simply to forward your CV and arrange an interview. They are not qualified to actually vet your ability in any way.

jbluepolarbear3• 4 years ago

I get this too. I wrote a number of design/game engines, design applications, and frameworks in C++ and I get recruiters that don’t understand that and start asking me basic C++ questions. One time they were reaching out to me about a design engine I wrote and didn’t even realize.

lordnacho• 4 years ago

Indeed they will end up asking you little questions that have zero to do with your engine and ding you for not knowing some particular trick. It drives me crazy.

eredengrin• 4 years ago

One time they were reaching out to me about a design engine I wrote and didn’t even realize.

Reminds me of this story https://brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-dem...

FpUser4• 4 years ago

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.

rjzzleep• 4 years ago

I actually just tried to play around with what seems to be a "modern c++" boilerplate project.

It uses CMake, conan for packaging, clang-tidy and cpp-check, and has templates for fuzz and unit testing[1].

I found it because qtcreator and kdevelop were weirdly clunky and created partly broken qt projects and I figured I wanted to add a package manager and qt to the mix.

The template looks really fancy, but it's so incredibly slow, to the point of being unusable.

It's a ramble yes. But the point is modern C++ tools seem to have added some niceties to the language, but they also brought more of the main C++ issues, i.e. slow compile times and nasty boilerplate in the build process. Yes, I realize CMake isn't modern and there are a bunch of new build tools.

[1] https://github.com/cpp-best-practices/gui_starter_template

P5fRxh5kUvp2th7• 4 years ago

I wouldn't put much stock into such starter templates, the developer who put them together has a goal and priorities that are not yours.

QT tends to be particularly painful outside of QTCreator so I also wouldn't use that as a general knock against C++.

having said that, C++ build times are slow due to both the #include mechanism and templates. The C++ modules coming will help deal with the #include mechanism and templates can be instantiated to assist the compiler.

None of it is amazing, but the compile times are better than rust imo.

Night_Thastus• 4 years ago

C++ modules has been promised for a long time, I wouldn't hold my breath on it coming anytime soon.

As for build times, it is sadly very easy in C++ to have long build times. Avoiding it takes careful work, knowing when and what to include, when to forward-declare instead, and always maintaining includes as requirements change, etc.

There's nothing to make that process any easier or automatic, which is very frustrating. There's the include-what-you-use project, but I could never get it to work.

bogwog3• 4 years ago

That is the most bloated boilerplate project I've ever seen. Does anyone actually use this for their projects? I would hope not. I know Javascript people are used to starting a project with a template/boilerplate, but that's not a good idea in C++ land. You actually need to understand the stack you're using, and all of the tools (unless you're working on a team, in which case that could be someone else's responsibility)

Also, QT projects aren't real C++ since they require an additional preprocessor to compile custom syntax additions for "signals" and "slots". As a consequence, tooling for those projects tend to be more complicated and clunky.

This linked project seems to be trying to stuff as many things as they possibly can into a hello world project. With Conan + CMake you only need like 3 files total in your entire project for something like this:

    * conanfile.txt: for declaring requirements/dependencies
    * CMakeLists.txt: describe how to compile your project
    * main.cpp: source code for the hello world app

Also,

Yes, I realize CMake isn't modern and there are a bunch of new build tools.

No!! That thinking is a trap. CMake is modern, and using something else is more likely to cause problems for you and anyone who might want to use your project. That boilerplate's is a bad example. A fully functional SDL2 hello world with Conan can be done with a ~4 LoC CMakeLists.txt.

Unless you have a very good reason (there are good reasons, but they're the exception rather than the rule), don't build your C++ project with anything other than CMake.

writeslowly• 4 years ago

When I graduated from school in 2010, my primary experience from a previous internship was working in an outdated style of C++. Interviewing for C++ positions was so intimidating that I ended up removing all references to it from my resume, essentially disavowing that I had any knowledge of the language, and applying for Java and Python jobs instead.

mkl952• 4 years ago

Rust should make the pool of C++ developers decrease exponentially in the coming decades. There's little reason to code a greenfield project in C++ unless it involves leveraging some niche libraries, and those niche libraries will eventually have Rust equivalents.

clappski• 4 years ago

There's much more reason to do a greenfield project in C++ than Rust - experienced C++ hiring is still considerably easier! Not everything has a purely technical motivator.

mkl952• 4 years ago

I'd say the trend in the industry is to hire engineers rather than language specialists. An experienced C++ guy should be able to learn the Rust basics in a few months.

nicoburns2• 4 years ago

experienced C++ hiring is still considerably easier

Perhaps, but you can take experienced devs with a background in other languages and expect them to write solid Rust code. You probably only need to hire 1 or 2 people who already know Rust.

alkonaut• 4 years ago

I'd be tempted to pick Rust for a greenfield project even if I had only a team of C++ devs with no prior Rust experience. Having one person that can teach it would help, but it's not an absolute necessity. And luckily every team has that one person ho is the Rust evangelist...

If you can program C++ you'll pick upp Rust more quickly than any other convert. Unless it's a startup with a short runway where you might not have the luxury of a slower start, then I think it would probably pay of in both productivity, staff retention, ease of recruiting (later), and a lot of other parameters.

datalopers• 4 years ago

C++ doesn’t require you attend an annual furry convention.

brink2• 4 years ago

Or be a part of a discord group that flies a pride flag in your face for 6 months of the year. A helping of ideology is what I've really been looking for in a programming language.

sebstefan2• 4 years ago

Uh, yes? The fursona just has to wear a white shirt.

twic8• 4 years ago

Real talk though, the only furry i know (that i know i know), i know from a C++ Slack.

Karsteski• 4 years ago

Annual furry convention might be fun though wdym

astrange9• 4 years ago

I thought furries were mostly network engineers.

sk1pper• 4 years ago

Hmm, I think that's a little heavy-handed. Just off the top of my head: CUDA (maybe other gpgpu stuff too), gamedev, most projects with a UI. The tooling you'd be using in those spaces is still bleeding edge; too much so to use with a greenfield project that you intend to put in production, imo.

I guess you said "in the coming decades," which might be true, but for the time being it's more than just niche libraries that might push one to use C++.

justin66• 4 years ago

There's little reason to code a greenfield project in C++ unless it involves leveraging some niche libraries,

Wanting a GUI is not a "niche" concern.

ativzzz5• 4 years ago

most desktop GUIs nowadays are written in JS because they run in browser or if they are desktop apps it's done via electron

twic8• 4 years ago

If you're writing a GUI app, you usually don't need the exceptional efficiency that is C++'s selling point, so you are probably better off using Swift or C#, instead of either C++ or Rust.

antegamisou4• 4 years ago

Claims like these always reduce C++ to a systems programming language, neglecting the fact that is primarily used in computationally expensive projects in which Rust cannot be a valid substitute.

Clobbersmith• 4 years ago

I've done a little bit of C++ in the last couple of years. Compared to pretty much any other common language out there the developer experience is full of pain. I can program C++ but why would I want to?

VMG• 4 years ago

that should raise the salary on the market, not lower it

cmrdporcupine8• 4 years ago

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 techniques etc etc etc. Not to mention the Chromium codebase as well, which I also worked in. I get the impression this is also a thing at Facebook.

All of this to say: if you want C++ programmers, you need to pay competitive enough rates to pull them away from there.

(That said, if you're hiring for C++, I'm looking.. and I don't expect a Google salary, just a fair one. I'm not the most elite C++ programmer in the world, but I can write good code and understand your system...)

ChrisMarshallNY8• 4 years ago

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, many moons ago, and one of the speakers was this wonderful woman that had recently moved to Adobe (a C++ shop).

She was supposed to speak about Swift, but ended up speaking about C++, and the wonderful, supportive community of older, experienced developers she found, around the language.

I loved it, but I'll bet a lot of the folks around me, were squirming.

cmrdporcupine8• 4 years ago

All sane C++ codebases must use a defined subset of the language. Google's is one that works for them, with some pretty strong standardization. It's a good set of compromises. But you won't get far programming in it if you don't know the broader semantics of the language.

I didn't do C++ from about 2003 to 2013. When I came back I was delighted. It's so much better.

orwin2• 4 years ago

Ah! "C+-" is what i called Golang when i first tried it around 2014-2015. I guess i can see where some ideas came from.

(Still a very good language if you know what to do with it)

UncleMeat4• 4 years ago

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.

wnolens• 4 years ago

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.

Analemma_• 4 years ago

There are only two types of C++ shops: the ones that use a rigorously-enforced subset of it, and the ones where the codebase is an impenetrable hornet's nest. You must decide on a subset of C++ to use or you'll go insane. Google made some opinionated choices and tradeoffs about which subset to use (as did Microsoft and every other company with a huge C++ codebase), and it's possible to disagree with the specific boundaries they chose, but the mere fact that they chose to do this is unimpeachable.

maxloh4• 4 years ago

Did they upload the recording to YouTube? I would like to listen to her.

kabdib2• 4 years ago

C+- is pretty common. I last read the Google C++ guidelines maybe ten years ago. They were pretty much in line with the decisions that other large C++ projects I've worked on had made, like we all encountered the same footguns and language misfeatures.

Every 5-10 years there's a big shakeup and the C++ culture changes, but it takes a long time for things to filter down into the embedded world (for instance).

jupp0r7• 4 years ago

"From what I understand, Google is really about a crippled subset of C++, that people jokingly call "C+-"."

Chrome is pretty good at using modern C++ FWIW.

pradn• 4 years ago

It's hardly "crippled". I find myself quite productive writing C++ at Google.

Take a look at the style guide yourself. I think it's pragmatic.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html

mooreds3• 4 years ago

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 labor shortage that salary can't solve". It may take some time (as people get trained up) but employers complaining about talent pool issues but paying get little sympathy from me.

For example, from a link in the article, consider this job https://www.efinancialcareers.co.uk/jobs-UK-London-C_Develop...

150k pounds for a job in London that is a tech lead position seem low to me.

efficax• 4 years ago

Although the pound has recently crashed, the general rule for comparing UK salaries to US ones is to 1.5x it to dollars. A £150k salary in London is equiv to a ~$200-250k salary in the US. Not bad, I'd say.

twic8• 4 years ago

150k plus bonus. It's at a quant firm, so the bonus is likely to be ~50% of base salary if you do okay, and multiples of that if you do great.

bearmode• 4 years ago

UK salaries on the whole are shockingly poor. That's actually a really decent salary here. Devs can start anywhere from £20k to £35k depending on background/where in the country you are.

BeetleB3• 4 years ago

The labor analogy for me is "there's no labor shortage that salary can't solve".

Perhaps not in SW, but there are plenty of labor shortages that salary can't solve. Some positions are simply not economically viable in certain markets - the pay required to get people to do them is more than a given business can afford. And I don't mean in the "cutting into the compensation of the business owner" type, but "not enough revenue to pay such salaries".

Try living in countries with very different economies (1st world, 3rd world, etc) and this becomes obvious. You'll see jobs in one country that simply cannot exist in another.

mywittyname2• 4 years ago

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.

forgotusername62• 4 years ago

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.

scruple2• 4 years ago

But they're bottled up in FAANG, I think.

Quite a few of them are locked up by AAA games studios, at least the ones that I personally know.

UltraViolence3• 4 years ago

I believe they're misguided to invest in C++. Enormous amounts of time and effort are spent solving weird pointer errors in C++ programs which simply don't occur in other languages such as Rust and C#.

Why is there this almost religious belief that their program needs the fastest execution time? It's madness IMHO. Trading a few percentage in performance for safety, reliability and security is more than worth it.

I still use C++ on a very regular basis, but C# is my mainstay at the moment.

spacemadness4• 4 years ago

I am no expert, but I am under the impression for HFT that high performance is the absolute goal and slight percentages in performance can affect profits.

UltraViolence3• 4 years ago

HFT entails only a small part of the usage of C++.

It's still being used in many embedded systems (including automotive, aviation and building automation), where Rust is also available. Interop is always possible with C/C++ so there's little excuse not to use Rust there.

einpoklum• 4 years ago

"eFinancial careers"? "ProfitView, a crypto trading tools developer"? "former software engineer at Barclays and Bank of America"? ... cry me a river.

Maybe they're seeing less C++ developers because more of us developed a bit of a moral backbone and don't go working for those socially parasitic enterprises.

spacemadness4• 4 years ago

I believe it also entails unreasonable working hours like a lot of things in the financial world.

stavros• 4 years ago

The pool "running dry" would imply that you can't find talented C++ developers at any price. If that's not the case, you just aren't paying enough.

The pool of jobs that will pay me $10m/year is also running dry, we really should do something about that.

spacemadness4• 4 years ago

The same has been said for embedded systems work while the jobs tend to pay 20-30% below webdev.

adam_arthur• 4 years ago

Then start projects in more modern languages that people actually want to work on

btilly4• 4 years ago

I've seen this story several times.

Once a language no longer has a developer pipeline, it becomes a language with no future. No matter how important and widely used. You wind up with jobs begging for qualified developers. Given how systems last, the language may survive indefinitely. As nobody dares migrate projects off of it. But employers will struggle more and more to find employees.

The first language that this happened to was COBOL. There are still a lot of COBOL systems out there. And a lot of COBOL jobs. But nobody wants to go into COBOL for fairly obvious reasons.

fouronnes32• 4 years ago

If you're an experienced C++ developer today, is it a wise career choice to go the "C++ expert" route, or should you pivot to something else?

btilly4• 4 years ago

It depends how much you like working with legacy code, and how much you love C++.

If you stay the "C++ expert" route you will always have a job, but it will be every more gnarly legacy code. Because those who had relatively good legacy code are also those who are going to find it easiest to migrate off of it.

Judging by what happened in Perl (the example that I know best), I'm guessing that most developers will leave C++. Mostly for languages in a similar space. A lot will go to Rust.

jollyllama2• 4 years ago

Depends on your opinion of Rust and the associated community.

dureuill• 4 years ago

C++ jobs are not going anywhere, quite the contrary. A lot of systems won't be rewritten. Besides, at least at the moment "C++ expert" is a perfect background for becoming a Rust expert should the want arise.

Rust *is* much more enjoyable to program in than C++, though

Bost• 4 years ago

But nobody wants to go into COBOL for fairly obvious reasons.

On YouTube, type in "COBOL Mainframe", and you'll find out pretty quickly that there's a plenty of guys from India, including juniors who work with or on COBOL and Mainframes.

btilly4• 4 years ago

You have a point.

However I'd also say that I'm not surprised to see people from India taking jobs that most developers don't want.

gigel824• 4 years ago

C++ is not going anywhere. All operating systems and almost all compilers for every other language (plus many of their runtimes) are written in it.

<s>When the heat death of the universe is upon us and all other languages have ceased to exist and re-emerged thousands of times over, C++ will still be here, driving the lower-most layers on top of hardware.</s>

6yyyyyy• 4 years ago

All operating systems

C != C++

btilly4• 4 years ago

I declare your comment to be high quality BS.

First of all I never said C++ was going anywhere. I compared it to COBOL which is still estimated to be involved something on the order of 60-80% of financial transactions. C++ has a similarly bright future.

But secondly, your claim is wildly overstated. C++ is a lot less fundamental and essential than you think.

Operating systems:

Linux and the *BSD family are written in C, with Rust making some headway. (But C++ would be over Torvalds' dead body - see http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus for example.) OS X is written in a combination of C and Objective C. Android is written in C and Java. Windows has a lot of C++, but the kernel is straight C for reasons that Raymond Chen explains at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/one-dev-minute/one-d....

Not only are not all operating systems written in C++, but most of the most successful ones aren't. And multiple groups, INCLUDING ones otherwise sympathetic to C++, have concluded that C++ is a terrible choice for kernels that are close to the hardware.

Compilers.

Well GCC is written in C. (Though Clang is C++.) So are the interpreters for Python, Ruby, Perl, and PHP. One of the backends for Go was originally C but has been ported to Go. (They maintain another C++ backend.) Julia's backend is mostly C. (A few libraries are C++.) However JavaScript and Java are both written in C++.

Reality is a long, long ways from your claim that almost all compilers for every other language are written in C++. In fact straight C is a more popular choice.

You didn't talk about GUI applications. But there you'd have more of a point - C++ is far more popular there. However even that it isn't a slam dunk. Rust was explicitly developed as a response to the fact that C++ makes security very hard. The idea being that it would be easier for Mozilla to port security critical modules from C++ to Rust than to secure C++. Since security is getting ever more important, it now makes sense to write in a different language first.

sgt• 4 years ago

C++ is the new COBOL.

bogwog3• 4 years ago

Question: what kind of skills do financial companies typically look for from C++ devs?

Whenever I hear “C++ expert”, I don’t know what that means. Are they masters of the STL? Are they part of the “C with classes” church? Are they an unhinged template meta programmer? Are they a major gcc/clang contributor? Did they co-author a part of the language spec?

Or are they just some dude with 7 years of experience working on a single C++ codebase and the subset of features that happens to be using?

posnet• 4 years ago

From my experience in HFT, the answer was "unhinged template meta programmer" with a healthy dose of assembly/reverse engineering thrown in.

twic8• 4 years ago

More specifically in trading, the most important thing seems to be to know how to write fast code, while keeping the codebase maintainable, because it's going to keep growing, and will need to change as the world changes.

That means avoiding polymorphism (and so a fair chunk of OO design), making heavy use of templates, and understanding the performance characteristics of language constructs and standard library functions. Expect to be slinging godbolts back and forth, benchmarking obscure hashmap implementations, and occasionally sweating over the precise layout of structs to maximise their cache-friendliness.

inetknght9• 4 years ago

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 "senior" C++ engineers weren't senior in real C++ experience. Even one of the hires ended up using a C style array in their first commit instead of std::array.

It's really frustrating and makes me wonder if perhaps I'm in the wrong job: maybe I shouldn't be a software engineer, maybe I should be a software educator to teach modern concepts and un-teach ancient concepts. Indeed, a lot of the ancient concepts directly contribute to the modern world's problem of software safety.

WkndTriathlete• 4 years ago

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 1997 and I'm listening to a talk about C++ compilers and hear that templates are now a Turing-complete language, and how the compiler developers used the template language to coerce the compiler into printing out the prime numbers.

Fast forward again to 2022 (with trips to Java, Kotlin, Scala, and Haskell in between) and I've got a project that requires JNI and Python bindings to a core C engine. Great, I'll use C++! I proceed to start searching for containers/constructs and realize that at least 50% of the C++ language and standard library is unreadable to me. I only have a guess as to what a `shared_ptr` or `unique_ptr` type is, and I certainly don't know when to use them, and concepts/traits outlined in the STL documentation seem to be some sort of generalizations that the STL might provide default implementations for, but might not? What exactly is the syntax and/or type of a lambda function and how do they interact with C function pointers? etc., etc.

I get the sense that C++'s evolution has been driven by esoteric corner cases that a handful of developers have encountered and the language & STL design has been driven by those cases. I'm still surprised by how many problems I can easily address in something like Scala or Haskell that C++ simply does not provide the facilities to express easily.

bodhiandphysics4• 4 years ago

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

zabzonk11• 4 years ago

so you have java and python and c, and then you decide to add c++ to the mix? not sensible, imho.

and nobody is forcing you to use lambdas - you can do everything with other language features

inetknght9• 4 years ago

I only have a guess as to what a `shared_ptr` or `unique_ptr` type is, and I certainly don't know when to use them, and concepts/traits outlined in the STL documentation seem to be some sort of generalizations that the STL might provide default implementations for, but might not? What exactly is the syntax and/or type of a lambda function and how do they interact with C function pointers? etc., etc.

And that's exactly my point though! `shared_ptr` and `unique_ptr` solve (or, at least, simplify) a lot of the memory management problems endemic to all C code and old C++ code. And they've been around for over a decade now.

I would absolutely be willing to spend some time with you to teach you what new things are, what they do (and what problems they solve), and how to use them without introducing new problems. I think several one-on-one teaching sessions would help you a lot with that. But one-on-one teaches you and not the thousands of other old-experienced C++ developers also in your shoes.

I get the sense that C++'s evolution has been driven by esoteric corner cases that a handful of developers have encountered and the language & STL design has been driven by those cases.

While some of the C++ evolution fits that category... I would also add that a lot of changes in modern C++17, C++20, or C++23 are aimed directly to the masses of C++ developers doing "everyday" work. shared_ptr and unique_ptr are definitely not esoteric corner cases: they're driven to specifically solve memory management problems that have directly contributed to some very significant CVEs in many thousands of products.

CoastalCoder• 4 years ago

I can't help but wonder if developers are simply off-put by the complexity of the language itself.

I certainly fall into this category. At one point I could have almost been considered a C++ language lawyer.

But then two things happened:

(1) I got stuck working on codebases that assumed C++11. Even now, I'm using Python3 and C++ (mostly 11, with a little 14/17 sprinkled in).

(2) The C++ language spec got significantly more complex after C++11. Without writing C++14/17 code on a regular basis, I just couldn't justify the time spent trying to keep up with it.

So for me, the cost/benefit ratio of trying to stay "current" with C++ is no longer worth it. I expect to prefer Rust over C++ for new projects.

sqeaky12• 4 years ago

C++ has fantastic docs, books, videos, so much. You shouldn't need to read the std library code, and shouldn't read it to know what is safe to do. There are many implementations and they differ in details but all have really good standards compliance, except where they document deviation (like EASTL omits some slow stuff).

If you want to iterate over a container, know promises about algorithmic complexity, have strong guarantees about type safety, or know what smart pointers promise to do then you can get all that without digging into the stdlib's code.

I know this wasn't the main point of your comment but shared_ptr can be thought of as a reference counted pointer. It cleans up the pointed to object when all the pointers to that object go away. It doesn't need to be reference counted, there are implementations that do goofy ring lists under the hood but all the operations on it are cheap O(1) operations and it is only slightly slower than a raw pointer, looking at the code might cause someone to miss the promises of computation complexity. For object you only want one of there is unique_ptr. You give it a pointer or constructor to make an object and when that pointer leaves scope it cleans up the object. Both are great for managing things like memory, connections, file handles, anything you want automatically cleaned up when the pointers leave scope.

Not all languages have the robustness that comes with a 40 year history, so learning last year's hotness and C++ are going to be different.

olvy0• 4 years ago

I'm with you mostly, although as the mostly sole maintainer of an 22 years old and still evolving C++ codebase (among some other responsibilities) I do try to keep up with the language. But if I didn't feel this was necessary for my job I probably wouldn't do it or at least won't sink too much time into it.

I've also programmed in Haskell and I've had the same reaction as you, as to the things I can easily express there and not in C++. However I think the 2 cultures (Haskell and C++) are similar in that they both attract people who like to produce clever code which is unreadable to other people, even though the base language is not that complicated.

As for your questions:

1) shared_ptr / unique_ptr: Personally I liked this presentation. Watch it on x2 speed until it gets to parts that are difficult for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGDLkt-jBJ4

2) lambdas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jCOwajNch0

This is more dense than the previous one. As for your question "how do lambdas interact with C function pointers": rough explanation is they are not the same, since they can possibly allocate memory if they capture. But if they don't capture anything they are just like a (static) function, and can be converted to a function pointer.

As for concepts / traits, rough answer is that you don't need to know about them for everyday work, unless you write a library / API for consumption by other C++ developers. In that case, they help the compiler provide better/shorter error messages in case template functions/classes aren't used properly.

opportune2• 4 years ago

You can do almost anything in C++ at least three different ways. Most places that care about engineering will not have you do abusive template metaprogramming or go crazy with macros, even though it’s possible to do in the language.

The std library is filled with bad implementations that can’t change because of backwards compatibility. So it’s not your fault that they look confusing. The pointer types you mentioned are actually quite simple, think of them as thin wrappers over raw ptrs with constructors/destructors that implement counting (for shared ptrs) and whose destructors do the delete operation (for unique ptrs, and for shared ptrs once they reach 0 copies).

Working with C++ can be easy and fun as long as you aren’t in a codebase where people went overboard with anti patterns or “cleverness”.

ryandrake6• 4 years ago

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::omfgbbq.

sqeaky12• 4 years ago

This is getting better. Businesses that force a specific compiler for reasons other than technical merit are being punished in the market.

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.

thefourthchime• 4 years ago

Raises hand. Everyone needs to read "Effective C++", which is mostly a book about how not to shoot yourself in the foot with C++. The book is old enough now that the way he recommends writing C++ wouldn't make it into a PR.

So for that reason, I tended to write C+, which is pretty much C+, with some classes.

nbjoerg2• 4 years ago

I find that argument funny, given that Rust can't be updated often enough before every other library breaks.

flohofwoe2• 4 years ago

That's the problem with the C++ ecosystem, it is actually many vastly different ecosystems mashed together. It's impossible to find a "C++ developer" because there is no agreed upon "one C++ style". It seems what you're looking for is a "C++ developer who likes to write the same C++ style as myself" ;)

inetknght9• 4 years ago

It seems what you're looking for is a "C++ developer who likes to write the same C++ style as myself" ;)

No, I'm perfectly content with someone writing C++ in a different style.

What I'm not content with is someone who uses old code without a technical reason why. C style arrays, for example, are 100% inferior to std::array. Old loops with indices are maybe 80% (off the cuff guesstimate) inferior to ranged-for. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to use `delete` in any C++ code that doesn't directly handle allocations (and so, very esoteric), and simlarly for `new`. But I keep seeing these things (and many other examples) show up in newly-written C++ code from "experienced" developers. Maybe 90% of the time they'll fix their code when I point out the modern solution and what problems the modern solution solves, and the last 10% of the time ends up in a technical argument about the merit of the old code (and that's fine as long as there is a technical merit for it).

vips7L2• 4 years ago

I've had the same experience in Java. Experienced engineers that are learning "new" Java even though those features came out years ago. I really think this will be the case for any language. Most people are not the HN type that are going to live and breath programming.

inetknght9• 4 years ago

I prefer to be proud that I've never touched Java... for Old Reasons. But that said, it's a valuable language.

It's nice to know that other languages have similar problems :)

nbjoerg2• 4 years ago

The ones on HN that actually work don't have the time to run after every few language feature either ;)

brnt• 4 years ago

C style array in their first commit instead of std::array.

In my neck of the C++ woods, neither are a good choice. My point is: C++ is not a language, it is a language group.

Most north Europeans speak a Germanic language, which have many shared features and often partially shared dictionaries, yet they mostly won't understand each other without some further study. As a Dutch speaker I can't judge the quality of somebody's German, even though it sometimes feels like I should be able to.

inetknght9• 4 years ago

In my neck of the C++ woods, neither are a good choice.

Just off the top of my head: "it's not resizeable" (use a std::vector instead) or "it's allocated on the stack instead of the heap" (you can use a std::unique_ptr<std::array> to put it on the heap). But what are the reasons to not use `std::array` in your neck of the C++ woods?

I can't judge the quality of somebody's German, even though it sometimes feels like I should be able to.

The cool part about software languages is that they're implementations of data structures and algorithms. Understanding those gets you most of the way to understanding what the code does regardless of whatever native language is spoken.

thedracle3• 4 years ago

The reality hammer hits quite a bit harder when people are playing the "fake it until you make it" game with C++ versus other languages as well.

kibwen2• 4 years ago

Hickling pointed to Java, which has long “seemed to be replacing C++ itself,” but hasn't.

This is inaccurate. Java completely ate C++'s lunch in the enterprise space back around the turn of the millennium. Java doesn't need to continue to eat into C++'s marketshare in other domains, because it has more than enough mindshare to sustain itself (there are more Java programmers than C++ programmers), and its very existence keeps C++ from reasserting itself in the enterprise space.

63• 4 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but now that everything is run in a docker container anyway, doesn't most of Java's appeal of "write once, run anywhere" from the turn of the millennium go away? At this point all it has is garbage collection and a network effect.

bodhiandphysics4• 4 years ago

Java has a number of other advantages... you can effectively develop for Linux on a windows box. The vm architecture makes debugging easier. It has a large and useful body of code, including lots of libraries and features that ease interfacing with legacy systems (like corba and soap)

twic8• 4 years ago

I don't think WORA was ever a really big deal for server-side work. In practice, you know what platform you're developing for, and even if you were developing on Windows and deploying on Solaris, you would have plenty of opportunities to test on Solaris before deploying.

I think the reason that Java beat C++ for boring line of business apps is that it was much, much quicker to write code which ran fast enough and didn't crash much. Having nice easy to use URL/HttpURLConnection classes built in was probably also a surprisingly big part of it!

another_devy• 4 years ago

Most of enterprise Java jobs in mid/ junior engineering level are similar to old times production assembly line, everything has a Factory or Impl from dependencies. All you have to do is add bunch of methods and connect API's and service bus (of course I'm extremely simplifying it, but) it's not hard to find people who can do that, also it's not hard to get them up to speed for what needs to be done so the churn rate doesn't impact a lot to enterprises which is a big win. In my personal experience I don't think that's possible with C++ so Java may have started with "write once, run anywhere" now its more of glue between longer running actors and constantly changing workforce

munificent• 4 years ago

At this point all it has is garbage collection

You say that like it's a minor thing, but GC is probably the largest language-related productivity improvement I've ever experienced as a developer, second maybe only to static types.

fsloth2• 4 years ago

Unless you need bare metal speed, or use some specific piece of code, never use C++. It is horrible, convoluted mess that will consume developer hours into pointless trivia that are not issues in anu other languages. So C++ has that as point against unless you want to waste developer hours on purpose. I’m saying this while writing C++ daily because in our domain (cad, geometric computing) for our use case it’s the best option only because mostly it’s the only option.

mk893• 4 years ago

Yes and the best part is that companies instead of migrating from Java to something lighter are simply trying new things like GraalVM which makes native executables.

So your developers can keep on writing crappy and heavy spring boot applications (which need 10-15 seconds in best case scenarios to to start) and eventually be "graalvm-ed" to produce a native executable that starts in < 1 sec.

I mean, that's a brilliant evolution (no jokes). This is how you keep in the game without getting devoured by Go and similar.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

all it has is garbage collection and a network effect.

It didn't have much of an advantage at the time either. It's advantage was that Sun was willing to shower SPARC boxes on your university for almost nothing if you were willing to move your core curriculum to Java.

YetAnotherNick2• 4 years ago

Java completely ate C++'s lunch in the enterprise space back around the turn of the millennium

When was that C++'s lunch? I might be wrong, but for backend dev(majority of enterprise work?) C++ was never a big thing.

trashface• 4 years ago

Late 90s. It was before Java got hotspot. Java prior to that was incredibly slow. Microsoft's J++ was a more performant runtime than Sun/Oracle java for several years. That ultimately became C#/.Net.

C++ had the benefit of running fast but it had all the problems you can still run into today. I'll never forget that app I worked on where function deep in the stack was returning a reference to a local string variable containing html...

anthonybsd• 4 years ago

Late 90s to early 2000s for sure. Tons and tons of backends of various kinds were written in it. If it was Windows it was typically running on COM/DCOM, and in UNIX it was usually CORBA. Sure, the UI was typically written in something else. Dawn of the Web with CGI, and if we are talking desktop people would use something like Visual Basic, Power Builder, or Delphi. But C++ pretty much dominated that space until Java got decent enough and fast enough.

wvenable• 4 years ago

Before Java, C++ was basically the only game in town for frontend and backend. There was always Visual Basic on Windows, and C, and a smattering of various pascal flavors.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

This, pretty much. Long before there was anything like Rust, Java was the memory-safe alernative to C++ for larger projects. And yes it was slow and clunky, but devs still put up with it because the benefits were so compelling.

markus_zhang3• 4 years ago

Well, hire me and train me. I'm a mediocre Python data engineer but self taught myself a bit of C and C++ plus I don't ask for high salary. Something like 90K CAD is good for me.

stefanos82• 4 years ago

I came here to say more or less the same.

I have been playing with C++ since 2003 (university years) and still haven't had any opportunity to get hired due to my lack of previous professional experience.

For some reason, my web development experience does not matter for them, nor they care that I do my best to learn from C++ experts we all know.

If they are so scared they cannot find talented C++ developers, it's about time to start training people and let them gain some experience.

Do they actually hire inexperienced people and train them or are they just complaining for years now (?); because quite frankly, I have been reading this since the release of C++11 and still haven't they found their "talented C++ developers"!

I'm here people! Hire me, train me, and prove me wrong with what I have said!

markus_zhang3• 4 years ago

Totally agreed!

22SAS7• 4 years ago

Most places need people who have production C++ experience. If someone is self-taught and hasn't done production-level C++, then some places are willing to train but don't expect to be hired in anything above a junior-level role.

markus_zhang3• 4 years ago

That's definitely expected. I'm fine with that.

jll29• 4 years ago

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.

FpUser4• 4 years ago

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.

Rochus• 4 years ago

Rather stop doing HFT.

mempko• 4 years ago

Rust is solving for the wrong problem. Null and dangling pointers aren't the main problem in building financial trading systems (I built a financial trading system).

zabzonk11• 4 years ago

there is a limited pool of talented programmers in ANY languge.

nradov2• 4 years ago

Talent is a myth. The pool is only limited at a particular point in time. Employers who require skills in a particular language can just provide training.

FpUser4• 4 years ago

I am not sure what do they mean under "talented C++ developers". If this is a person who knows all of C++ and constantly uses all the features then sure, you will not find too many people with this kind of experience.

Reason being I think is that they're not really needed in almost all cases. Most people will do just fine using specific subset that is adequate for a given project.

What is really needed are people who can think and "properly" architect and implement the system. They're way more valuable and will do just fine in most of the languages.

orwin2• 4 years ago

Well, it's quite easy:

My brother actually likes C++ (and is probably better at it than most devs i worked with, even those writing a DB in C). He also is finishing school, and is searching for an internship. C++ internship flat out don't pay enough. 600 euros/month. He is looking in a specific field in particular (audio and/or radio) and is currently expending to drones, so this might not help, but i find this crazy.

tlhunter• 4 years ago

This was the consensus in a webinar from ProfitView, a crypto trading tools developer, on high frequency trading using C++.

Maybe the discerning developer just doesn't want to enable the current snake oil fad.

rubyist5eva2• 4 years ago

I should brush up on my C++...how's the pay looking? Ruby pays very well, which is my current bread and butter.

timbit425• 4 years ago

The pay is terrible, which is why they think the pool is running dry.

rubyist5eva2• 4 years ago

womp womp

cdelsolar• 4 years ago

i hate C++ but i can program in it fine enough probably, as long as there's not too much template nonsense.

matthews2• 4 years ago

The template nonsense is what makes it fun!

ptero• 4 years ago

There are now more options for many tasks that used to land squarely into the C++ land: rust for low level and low latency stuff; python for a high level glue for some latest algorithms; ruby, JS for web.

On the other hand, C++ grew into a very complex language. For example if someone is not well versed in template metaprogramming meaningfully contributing to an existing project leveraging it could take a while.

So when a new project starts, C++ is rarely the top choice. And as the job pool shrinks, developer pool does, too; usually even faster, as younger developers do not want to be known as experts in a complicated legacy language. My 2c.

bjornsing• 4 years ago

I’d say the pool of talented people in general is running dry.

codalan2• 4 years ago

The pool of C++ devs hasn't dried up.

They're just working on other things in other languages.

If there was strong demand for embedded C/C++ devs that paid well, I wouldn't be doing C# REST APIs on Azure. Not that I don't enjoy working on APIs, but I do like working with bare metal more.

nottorp• 4 years ago

Which C++ anyway?

Old one or the new one that looks like a lisp interpreter but at compile time? :)

jbluepolarbear3• 4 years ago

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.

p0nce• 4 years ago

The problem of C++ is that it's a bad personal investment since you will need to re-learn the language all the time. Almost every other language respects your time more. Not getting back... ever.

lpapez• 4 years ago

Not just the language, entire toolchain and community are like this. Yesterday I upgraded my Go compiler, everything worked straight away, got free performance improvement on my code. I still shudder when I remember upgrading to a new version of GCC, Clang, MSVC. Took weeks to setup everything and fix newly created bugs. Not getting back... ever.

DeathArrow13• 4 years ago

Where are all the C++ programmers?

I'm still here, but I switched from C and C++ to C# and .NET and from desktop and games and mobile apps to backend.

I feel more productive, the wage is better and there are more jobs.

stormbrew• 4 years ago

Once upon a time I knew the c++ standard like the back of my hand. I was excited about the first few standard revisions, and read proposals as they came out.

Now I think it's a dead end and would sooner start a new project in C than C++ (but would prefer neither). The language that exists now is spending all its efforts fighting yesterday's battles, and it's rapidly losing relevance.

It used to be my bread and butter, but the only way I'd take a job that was for c++ programmers now is if it was to help migrate it to a language that lives in 2022 instead of endlessly relitigating the PL battles of 2008.

dreadedfuture• 4 years ago

I can see why since I am searching for jobs:

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.

dvzk• 4 years ago

#1 needs to be emphasized.

8-12 years ago I knew modern C++ inside-and-out. I worked on high-performance template developer libraries. These days whenever a C++ opening comes up in my job feed, it's in game development or it requires extensive domain-specific embedded/firmware experience. I just shrug and move on.

eqvinox• 4 years ago

My impression always was that the problem with C++ is the high skill/brain cost in relation to usable ability payoff… which makes a limited talent pool a logical consequence.

(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.)

bena• 4 years ago

I believe it. C/C++ was one of the earlier languages I knew. It was my workhorse language.

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.

oxff• 4 years ago

Most of C++ programming is tied in legacy code and tech debt, that is why it has that image. Only so few modern green field C++ projects with latest standard out there.

fouronnes32• 4 years ago

It's getting harder and harder to justify using even the most bleeding edge C++ for a new project.

lubesGordi• 4 years ago

That's true, but if you can find a place that isn't just new features all the time and you can refactor, it's so satisfying cleaning up some shit ancient c++ with clean modern c++.

shmerl• 4 years ago

I think the general idea of Rust seen as more interesting to invest efforts in is on point.

nradov2• 4 years ago

Talent is a myth.

https://www.inc.com/graham-winfrey/malcolm-gladwell-on-hirin...

Any developer can learn C++ (or at least the subset used in most real-world code). It's not like theoretical quantum physics or something. Hire people and then send them to training.

Can't afford to train your employees? Then you don't have a viable business in the first place. Might as well liquidate and return the capital to investors instead of wasting time on a slow death spiral.

Ragnarork2• 4 years ago

I find it funny that the headline states it as a general trend while it's looking at it only through the prism of "the finance/crypto industry struggles to find C++ developers".

Maybe part of the problem is that people don't want to work on your bullshit crypto products, or just on HFT.

joezydeco• 4 years ago

Bingo. I've been approached continuously by recruiters looking for finance and/or crypto firms and I won't go anywhere near it.

2x the salary but 10x the stress with type A finance bros yelling at you constantly? Fuck that.

Full disclosure: I'm a sucky C++ programmer. If if they're approaching me that means they've chewed up everyone else they can find. So, another red flag.

badpun3• 4 years ago

If if they're approaching me that means they've chewed up everyone else they can find. So, another red flag.

This reminds me of an old Woody Allen joke: I wouldn't want to join the club that would have standards low enough to accept me as a member.

daveslash• 4 years ago

Yep - you're right. This is a red flag I learned to recognize when I was young. When I turned 16 and could legally apply to jobs, I walked into a local restaurant and asked about a dishwashing position. I filled out the application right in front of the hostess, handed it to her, and without her even looking at the name she asked "Can you start today?". I took the job. I know better...now....

22SAS7• 4 years ago

2x the salary but 10x the stress with type A finance bros yelling at you constantly? Fuck that.

I am in that industry and this hardly happens. Probably at places like Citadel, not otherwise. In HFT's, traders are basically quantitative traders now. They do both strategy development and trading i.e they have a strong STEM background and are much different than finance bros at most traditional hedge funds.

epinephrinios2• 4 years ago

Almost all crypto projects use Rust.

Ragnarork2• 4 years ago

My LinkedIn inbox says otherwise.

gigel824• 4 years ago

The comments here worry me. I've been programming C++ professionally for 15+ years and I think my comp is pretty good. I didn't shop around though (maybe I should just to see what the market is like, but I hate LeetCode or whatever it is kids do nowadays :) ).

We've noticed the C++ pool getting dry when hiring though; nowadays everyone that comes to interview uses Python and JavaScript. We're switching part of our stack to TypeScript because we simply can't find qualified C++ developers (or folks in general willing / able to learn C++).

bogwog3• 4 years ago

What industry are you in? From the comments, what I've gathered is that anything in the embedded space is awfully underpaid unless you work for Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc.

And finance can pay well, but web development pays better.

gigel824• 4 years ago

We're doing cross-platform client applications (primarily Windows desktop apps with some macOS and a bit of iOS/Android).

sigi642• 4 years ago

I was a C++ programmer for 25 years. Last 3 years, I'm using Rust language in my daily job and for all my hobby projects. I will not return to work in C++ again. No money can make me to change my decision. Nowadays, programming is a pure joy for me again. This was not the case when I had to work with C++.

selfmodruntime3• 4 years ago

I agree. No matter gray beards bashing Rust on HN every time it comes up, programming in Rust brings me joy and I will never use C++ again if I have a choice.

gigel824• 4 years ago

Interesting; could this be because you've been using outdated C++ ? (legacy codebases started before C++98 tend to be particularly painful)

FWIW, I prefer the power of C++ over Rust's hand-holding; but can also see its appeal for someone that's not as confident over the minutia.

zabzonk11• 4 years ago

i will admit to the beard, but isn't it strange that the number of posts praising rust and haskell has dropped of a cliff here in the past months?

thrwyoilarticle2• 4 years ago

I've drank C++'s kool aid. I believe in the vision and think of everything in C++ terms.

...I think I could last about 3 months in another language before I'd forgotten too much to go back.

gridspy18• 4 years ago

I doubt that's true. I haven't used C++ for many years now. I was in your boat a few years ago (C/C++ since 1990) but now 6+ years Python then Rust centric. I still think in C++ terms when writing rust, although most of the time it's "I would need 10 lines to do this 1 line of rust code were I still using C++."

I dabble in C++ occasionally as a contractor. No problem picking up the new features and making useful contributions.

C++ maps pretty directly into Rust. I found it useful to understand the underlying data representation in memory. For instance https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/repr-rust.html

pjmlp10• 4 years ago

I moved into managed compiled languages back in 2006, still dabble in C++ pretty much ok, and code is relatively modern (enjoying modules in VC++ nowadays).

martin1975• 4 years ago

same here. I've pounded C++ and C code for 20+ years. Rust is the right tool to replace both of these. Long live Richie (well maybe not him but his work), Kernighan and Stroustrup.

keithnz• 4 years ago

long time C++ programmer here too, 30ish years, but I don't use it for much anymore. While I like that the language has improved, it's just a nicer experience coding in other languages.

Kukumber• 4 years ago

the west repeated the same mistakes as when they decided to let china become the factory of the world

now they pay the price

they thought they could outsource embedded/system devs too, if you go check in Indonesia and Taiwan, the amount of people who dab with embedded/robotic stuff is insane

dysoco• 4 years ago

I'd love to get into low level programming, game development or somewhere where C++ has to be used (I'd rather use another language probably but not gonna get picky); however, in my experience (and this might differ vastly since I'm in South America):

1. There are really few jobs doing this here compared to web development; there are maybe less than ten new openings in LinkedIn a month.

2. Most if not all of these ask for Sr positions with +5 years of experience, there are no jr jobs to get this experience from (except maybe from university or public research entities, which just don't pay enough to cover rent).

3. Most of these are just maintaining old legacy software written in C++, the jobs in games, embedded, low-latency, etc. are REALLY far and between or nonexistent.

4. Many don't allow for remote work, whereas in web development it's the norm.

5. You can say goodbye to part-time work, it's not the norm in web development either, but since there are so many jobs there you eventually will find one that'll allow you to work less hours.

6. Even if you get the perfect job, it might still pay less than a Sr React position or whatever; I'd personally rather work in something interesting for myself, but someone with a family might not.

I haven't been investing time in looking for remote work in the US or EU yet, in my little experience, they usually do not allow for remote work, or only for Sr positions. However I'm sure it's possible since there are much more openings outside.

So personally I believe there's a lot for these companies to improve so this pool of talents grow, and it doesn't even imply higher wages; they can focus on hiring from another countries and/or more jr candidates. There won't be more "talented C++ developers" if these people can't learn or grown anywhere. There's a lot of talented people right out of college they just don't have the work experience yet.

cjensen2• 4 years ago

For anyone looking for a junior who knows C++ in Canada, we've had good luck with Sheridan College in Oakville ON.

wheelinsupial• 4 years ago

Is this for graduates coming directly from high school or are you seeing success with people that already hold degrees and are going for retraining or up-skilling?

cjensen2• 4 years ago

New college grads who went to college right after high school. They have a strong intern program, so the students usually have some real-world experience using C++.

eBombzor• 4 years ago

Talented as in knowing how to use C++ footguns or talaented as in understanding most C++ features but having the wisdom to avoid 90% of them?

rychco2• 4 years ago

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 install libraries, different C++ standard features supported, etc.

I like C++, and tooling has come a long way, but it’s so much easier to download rust/Python/node and you’re basically set on every platform & immediately ready to go. NOW consider pay, and even someone enthusiastic about programming C++ will reconsider.

aliqot• 4 years ago

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!

spoils19• 4 years ago

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

selfmodruntime3• 4 years ago

This. Learning the language as a whole is an incredibly daunting task. It's ugly, it's built on a combination of OOP and procedural C and quite frankly, the class syntax in combination with header files has aged pretty bad. I feel like I have a lot of code I need to write twice.

The standard committee keeps tacking on new features and decade old footguns are promised to never be fixed (and somehow, people consider this a feature).

Tooling is even worse.

codalan2• 4 years ago

It's only ugly because it was meant to be a federation of different programming paradigms. You can mix low level C calls with homegrown RAII frameworks, or mix traditional OOP with functional programming. Once you start throwing in preprocessor macros, meta programming, and templates, you can have a codebase that is incredibly complex to understand and maintain.

As for the header/implementation separation, I always thought it was a good idea to have that flexibility. I've worked in codebases where the compilation units were fairly large and complex and would be implemented in separate files. This would be similar to partials in C# I've also worked with some code that would determine the target compilation units at build time. Not saying it was the best approach at the time, but it was one option.

If anything scares off people from C++, it would definitely be the breadth of the language, though. You could work in C++ for over ten years and possibly not even encounter or use half of the functionality it provides. And because of it's breadth, going from one C++ codebase to another could look completely different. Especially when looking at something written for a Unix/Linux/Posix system vs Windows.

greyman• 4 years ago

I coded in C++ professionally for about 15 years and don't remember it would be "incredibly daunting". Not easy, but doable. But yes, I also exited the pool, now I work in Golang and just wouldn't go back to C++.

m463• 4 years ago

I find python such a pleasure in comparison. I can express myself so easily.

germandiago17• 4 years ago

True. I also like Python.

The problem is when you need 30 servers instead of one to manage your load, though, lol.

greyhair8• 4 years ago

As long as you force everyone to run their code through pylint.

Nothing like hitting a really rare corner case at runtime that just fails syntax and the process exits.

jupp0r7• 4 years ago

There's also the opposite problem: older devs will use outdated features and have best practices in place that are now considered antipatterns. This exacerbates the existing difficulties to modernize legacy code bases and creates incentives to not do so. New devs are forced to learn C++ from 20 years ago which is much worse than modern C++.

deviantbit2• 4 years ago

The difference between C++ today, and what we had 20 years ago is not much. C++ has functionality built in today, we didn't have, but the OS provided, and now the language has many features we wished we had years ago.

Example: Variadic templates. When that happened, the problems we would bang our head against the wall with magically vanished. Twenty years ago, every implementation of the std library had serious bugs in it. It was avoided. Not the case today. I remember a std::map iterators not working. Watcom's C++ had serious flaws with it, but many exciting products were still created with it.

We didn't complain. We were happy, and worked around our problems.

I think the root of peoples issue with C++ is with template meta programming portions of it, which you can completely ignore, and grow into.

astrange9• 4 years ago

My experience with C++ is that every five years I come in and see people claiming that not only should I never do whatever I was told five years ago, but actually it was never popular and nobody ever did it. Mostly about ways to allocate objects or use smart pointers.

I'm still wondering why `(int)` is spelled `reinterpret_cast<int>` in C++. Do they just like hitting keys on the keyboard?

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

have best practices in place that are now considered antipatterns

Like using C++ you mean?

thrwyoilarticle2• 4 years ago

IME the nature of C++ attracts smug trivia experts more than typical softeng. Skilled, yes, but unhelpful.

ayberk3• 4 years ago

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 reason).

DeathArrow13• 4 years ago

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.

jeffreyrogers4• 4 years ago

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).

germandiago17• 4 years ago

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

Too bold statement. There are still lots of reasons to keep using C++. LOTS.

pencilguin7• 4 years ago

This is exactly equivalent to saying all existing C++ programmers should be demoted to doing only maintenance work, or fired.

As such, it is in violation of site terms and conditions, and damned rude.

intelVISA6• 4 years ago

As a C++ enjoyer I would 100% have learned Rust if it was around when I started... just for Cargo alone.

Problem is now I've already done my time in the Makefile trenches there's little incentive in me re-learning another systems lang and having to compete with lots of smarter people, with more Rust exp, for jobs whilst giving up all my arcane knowledge of CMake and friends.

Rust being popular atm is great for C++ if I'm honest as it siphons away a new gen of systems programmers over to another lang allowing me to sell my dark services for more coins.

larsrc3• 4 years ago

I did my time in the Makefile trenches, too. I'm happy that I've learned other languages. There will always be smarter people than you, but you will bring your particular knowledge and do new things. Keep on learning!

chaostheory5• 4 years ago

I wonder how the Cobol market is doing?

StreamBright• 4 years ago

The incentive is to do it for the greater good. For a safer, better future.

ahepp2• 4 years ago

it siphons away a new gen of systems programmers over to another lang allowing me to sell my dark services for more coins

I've always been curious about whether it really works this way. First order, one would consider supply and demand leading to increased wages. But whenever I've looked into the reports of "COBOL programmers are getting paid a fortune because there are so few of them alive!", the reality has been that wages are ... unimpressive.

My hypothesis is that as the talent pool shifts elsewhere, the market dries up. For instance, new projects aren't started in COBOL any more (well, at least anywhere I've seen...). You're left doing maintenance on ancient systems, where the calculus is always "this needs to be cheaper than a new solution". Maybe it's the "liquidity" of the job market for a given language?

mxschumacher2• 4 years ago

you have picked up so much meta knowledge (debugging, testing, build optimizations), domain understanding and soft skills that making the switch might be less tough than you think. Plenty of coins in Rust land, too!

strangattractor2• 4 years ago

%90 of what people do today is import some open source library or package to do the heavy lifting and weave them into an app using a scripting language. It is sort of the MS Basic approach of the web app world. Nothing wrong with that. C++ is used for a different class of problems that are not the main focus of the industry anymore. I would likely choose something like Rust today but at the time C++'s star was rising there really weren't a lot of other better options.

greyhair8• 4 years ago

As an older dev, screw those older devs that 'roast your code'.

The really good ones won't do that. The ones that do suffer from some weak superiority complex. I had three awesome mentors when I started writing C, and a couple great mentors when I did what little C++ work that I had to do.

The only scold I ever dealt with wrote overly wrought, overly complex crap. Kitchen sink patterns to handle any possible future variation, instead of solving the problem at hand.

Stay away from people like that, they'll just turn you into the same old grouch.

sunjester• 4 years ago

I personally know c++ and know others who are also well versed in c++. I have a disagreement with the computer industry and won't work in an embedded space. Others won't be hired because of their lifestyle, looks, or past record. The pool isn't running dry it's being drained.

zeroonetwothree• 4 years ago

I love C++ and I have 15+ years of experience. But I have no desire to work in finance. Apart from that there don't seem to be many good job opportunities. So instead I'm slinging JS like everyone else and making 500k...

Hatrix• 4 years ago

A job description might say C++ at the top but, it will be followed with a page of other requirements and weeks of interviews. They won't hire you unless you are already doing everything.

arunmu• 4 years ago

I have been a big fan of C++ and have had used it for about 8-9 years professionally as well as for side projects. The baggage that comes with it is just not worth it. My recommendation for any new project is to go either with Go or Rust as a C++ replacement unless the environment or hardware or resource constraints does not allow you otherwise.

As an individual developer, learning and being an expert in C++ intricacies is not worth the time and effort. Instead learn more about data layout in memory, hardware, language tooling etc and write code accordingly in a much better language as per the _need_ and C++ would really only qualify for very niche requirements.

ho_schi• 4 years ago

Actually I've learned C++ in the past years and want to look into a working in embedded development. Now I'm reading that the industry is in need for C++ developers but paying bad at the same time? I'm confused.

smolder2• 4 years ago

So are the ones hiring, apparently.

hardwaregeek• 4 years ago

Andy Kelley noted that contributions to the self hosted zig compiler were way higher than to the C++ one. This matches up with my experience. I’d love to work on Swift but do I want to work on it so much that I’d write C++? Nah. Ditto PyTorch, XLA, LLVM, etc. I should probably bite the bullet and learn C++, but dammit Rust land is so nice.

adamius• 4 years ago

Is the pool running dry or are they simply not putting enough water in or allowing enough people through the gate? I've seen the job ads. Must have five years. Must have x, y, z. For a junior position. Unrealistic.

Same person can get a web job elsewhere with much less nonsense. So off they go.

Like a lot of things in IT these shortages are nonsense. They are lobbying for visa relaxation or similar so they can pay less.

pyb4• 4 years ago

This. The gatekeeping can be intense : "must be proficient in C++ template metaprogramming", etc.

DeathArrow13• 4 years ago

The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved. Rust got an 87% approval rate in the "most loved" category of the Stack Overflow Survey. However, only 9.3% of respondents used Rust at all and only 8.8% did so professionally. C++, meanwhile, languished at 48%.

It seems that developers who never used Rust love Rust. I love neither but if I would to pick one to use, I would pick C++ because for myself is much easier.

Brystephor2• 4 years ago

Why doesn't c++ offer a language version that's trimmed down to "modern" rules? Meaning all things that were deprecated, or not recommended, are cut out of the language. What I find difficult is that there's several ways to do the same thing but each option has some nuance or gotcha with it. This is said as a beginner who did half of learncpp

thesuperbigfrog2• 4 years ago

> Why doesn't c++ offer a language version that's trimmed down to "modern" rules?

What part could be removed without breaking backward compatibility?

Depending on what is removed and how, it creates a subset that is not fully C++.

Brystephor2• 4 years ago

It'd be a different version that's not intended for backward compatibility. This would be beneficial for any new projects or new learners who don't need to sift through decades of changes.

There can still be the standard updates every 3 years for backwards compatibility, but Id assume version upgrades don't happen very frequently. Meaning, if a project is started on c++11 then it's probably going to stay on c++11 indefinitely, never making it to c++17 or some other later version.

If that's true then that would imply in general the projects using c++17 or later are created from scratch using that standard and therefore wouldn't suffer from backwards compatibility.

This is all said as someone who works with Java where I don't see folks migrating from Java 8 -> 11 or later.

ironmagma• 4 years ago

Employers might have to… gasp… train their employees.

sedeki• 4 years ago

What do these presumably highly-paid C++ developers work with exactly? And what is their background? How much do they make in London?

I have a degree in mathematics, am ~36 years old, but only worked as a web dev.

I'm thinking about taking courses in mathematical statistics or physics. I want to "get out" of web dev. This type of job would be a huge step up for me. Just unsure how to begin a career change...

joker99• 4 years ago

It gets worse: try finding a Windows C++ developer with kernel experience. They seem to be a rare breed... And finding one who has even a bit of security experience and a defensive coding style is even harder

fxtentacle• 4 years ago

No, they're just cheapskates!

I remember this exact same recruiting agency spammed me a $120k offer to become Lead Developer for a new quantitive trading algorithm. For that salary, they also expected me to relocate to London. Some C++ consulting gigs pay $2k per day, so their offer just seemed really cheap in comparison.

jdlyga• 4 years ago

Personally, I would love to work in c++. It’s my favorite language to work in. I have over a decade of experience with it professionally. But, seems like most jobs these days are python.

jollyllama2• 4 years ago

Part of the equation is that C++ devs just aren't as fungible as Python, Rust, and devs in newer languages (not that being a C++ and a Python dev is mutually exclusive). The reason for this is that a lot of the C++ codebases were written before adoption of open source 3rd party libraries was widespread and codebases were more bespoke in general. So, as a consequence, the effectiveness of a C++ dev in any given org is highly correlated to tenure. It's tough to penetrate as a new dev, and if you have to move companies, it sets you back considerably. It's like a forest with poor soil and a mature canopy; difficult to take root in.

praptak• 4 years ago

"Not enough talent" means "not enough talent for your shitty pay and/or horrible work conditions".

I spent my first ~5 years at Google working in C++. Google didn't seem to have a problem finding enough C++ folks whose C++ skill is basically "writes compilers and maintains a template library as a hobby" or "can explain a garbled stack trace in a crash dump". Also folks without prior C++ experience did reach this level while working there.

TheLoafOfBread• 4 years ago

I was contemplating to work with C++, but coincidentally I got into C (microcontrollers) and C#/.NET (desktop apps). And every time when I am forced to work with C++ (.NET CLR DLL libraries) I am reminded about general typing overhead which I do not need to do in C# - i.e. HPP file with declarations and CPP file with definitions; Enums can't be translated to its string representation directly, but you need to have some helping function to do that... gross.

fluoridation• 4 years ago

It depends on what you do. There are things that can be very easily done in C++ with a macro or a template that are simply impossible in C# and you just end up hammering out brain-dead code.

diego_moita• 4 years ago

No, the pool isn't running dry.

Pay me more and I'll go back to C++.

For the same salary I'll stay with Rust.

viig99• 4 years ago

TBH high levels skills on C++-20 is not what these companies are looking for, instead on C++-14 or so, meanwhile anyone learning C++ in 2022 would rather want to pickup C++-20 ++ with its niceties, old C++ is too tiresome without extra rewards.

VLM2• 4 years ago

The article very specifically states "very high levels"

That has two effects:

1) Given how ineffective the hiring process is at selecting skill, they would never hire even Bjarne Stroustrup. Average to incompetent people trying to select "very high level" people usually get scammed by the most imaginative resume bandits.

2) Programming languages are not as fixed as spoken languages, and "very high level" people are making more money in other languages, or less tedious languages.

The article also uses language like "programmers" in a generic sense but the site is specifically for the financial services career field as are all the quotes. I've worked in financial services and the highly skilled people who can learn anything would never learn C++ because it doesn't pay nearly as well as, well, anything else in financial services IT departments. Someone made a huge architectural error in designing a system requiring the highest level C++ programmers but never telling HR to pay them enough to find any. If I were still doing financial services work I'd never learn C++, that would be dumb, I'll make a lot more money learning... anything else in that industry, or learning skills that transfer out of the industry.

The article also mentions automotive, another example of a giant slow moving industry that underpays and over-Dilberts its C++ programmers.

What I enjoyed about my time in financial services is they understood their money depends on generous IT spending, they understood the value of documentation and code review, and it was a stable industry. Not perfect in an absolute sense but "more so relative to other industries". I would have to think for awhile if those values fit the C++ community. My immediate guess is "no" but I'm not certain, everyone liked the generous budget but the constant review and oversight was often a little excessive.

United857• 4 years ago

C++ is still dominant in the AAA games world, and there's no signs of it ending its reigns at least at the engine level.

IMO it's not so much that there aren't talented C++ developers or "Rust is the new hotness", it's the long standing WLB/culture issues of the games or the finance industry that's causing many of them to burn out and move to FAANG/Microsoft/etc. (I'm one of them)

Animats• 4 years ago

Ah, employer thinking. There should be a "pool" of available C++ programmers. Not that they should hire reasonably good programmers and train them in C++.

skhameneh• 4 years ago

I'm surprised to not see any comments mentioning Rust and Go. (Rust is mentioned in the article)

Go intends to bring better team efficiency without giving up much performance. Rust intends to bring safety with similar performance to C++.

There's mentions of Python (and some others) in comments, but those language stray a bit too far from being useful as general purpose languages where C++ has been used historically (but that's not too say there aren't efforts to use Python/Cython embedded).

RadixDLT• 4 years ago

c++ will be replaced by Carbon or D and rust and others

jupp0r7• 4 years ago

If this was true, salaries would be way up. Are they? Not from what I can tell. I recently switched to a web dev role and didn't have the impression that demand for my (imho considerable) C++ skills was crazy high.

dragontamer2• 4 years ago

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.

cjg• 4 years ago

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%"

dragontamer2• 4 years ago

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.

mvuksano• 4 years ago

I wondered why C/C++ is not appreciated more by engineers. I hear a lot of comments along the lines "rust is safer". While I get it is safer in some aspects a lot of times I've heard people end up writing unsafe rust anyways. Then the next argument goes well you should write as little as possible of that unsafe rust. Fact of life is that you will need to write unsafe rust. Actually unsafe INSERT_ANY_LANGUAGE_HERE. My point is as an engineer you will need to learn how computer works. And I don't mean just at a surface level but really deep. So once you have that knowledge why not just use it?

crims0n• 4 years ago

I agree for C. It's simple, it's fast, it's portable, and it's a fantastic gateway into ASM. To your point, I believe learning it is an important part of foundational computer science - and for that reason I don't think it will ever go away completely.

C++ on the other hand...

speeder3• 4 years ago

I am one of the few stubborn people I guess, that insists in wanting to work with C++, C, Lua...

All I see is Python, Ruby, JS, Java, etc... jobs. So why bother learning a language that has no jobs for it? No wonder the amount of developers are decreasing. It is just offer meeting the demand.

n4jm4• 4 years ago

So hire Rust and FPGA devs.

humanwhosits• 4 years ago

Employers just need to pay more, the devs will appear.

magicloop2• 4 years ago

The article focuses on the financial world. Historically in the UK (and elsewhere) finance roles have had strong interest for applicants, and high salaries were on offer. So the industry could pick the "most talented".

Now the model has broken down which is the motivation for the article. That's because the "talented" C++ developers have been hived off by the big tech firms (which can pay equivalent salaries or more), or the top video game companies (which generally pay low but make up for it in fun).

What remains are the "normal" developers. But their nature of business means you can't achieve a market edge with that level of talent, all else being equal.

This was never the case for COBOL because that was deployed to keep the business running, not for creating unique value and market edge. So "normal" developers work out just fine.

Finance firms hire a lot of talented graduates. They need to work against their natural inclinations, and provide training and mentorship to get those folks up to speed with C++; a long journey. They don't want to do it due to being seen as providing a cross-subsidy to their competitors when the graduates switch companies.

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

As the COBOL pool did before it.

C++ was great in its era but has been supplanted by other languages for safety and performance reasons and it's fine that it's on its way out.

The tail will be long (there are billions of lines of C++ code that will need to be replaced or rendered so fundamental that they cannot be mutated without breaking expectations), but there's no shame in a language running its course.

VintageThinkpad• 4 years ago

Huh, I need to pick me up one of those plentiful jobs.

Just thinking out loud, for us folks who have done that for a long time, I can see more reasons why people don't look for more gigs once they have stepped off of the wheel. (aside from the real or imagined problem of ageism of course).

. The torture of the modern software interview. Not worth it if you have enough money to live on already.

. The tendency for modern companies to simply grind out more of the same. There was a time when there was a lot of genuinely new product development going on in the larger embedded and workstation app space.

. The strong notion of small stepwise increments in development rather than being cut loose for some time. Writing to a series of tickets really sucks if you are used to being left alone.

I'm not saying that things are worse, just different.

LatteLazy• 4 years ago

There is no "pool"

There is only a market.

And the market, in it's perfect wisdom, will always supply exactly the correct number of talented C++ devs.

If you cannot get one, it is because you are not willing to pay the market price.

makemethrowaway• 4 years ago

Should I move away from c++ ? Anyone has done this? Everytime I try to do this I get dropped citing I lack "professional" webdev experience. Thanks in advance.

tempxyz• 4 years ago

C++ is dead but as usual most of the industry lags behind.

spacechild12• 4 years ago

How exactly is C++ dead if it is widely used in the industry?

timbit425• 4 years ago

No one is choosing it for new projects. It's become undead like COBOL and Fortran.

juancn• 4 years ago

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.

gavinray4• 4 years ago

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<T>) 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

jjtheblunt3• 4 years ago

"IE" ?

gavinray4• 4 years ago

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

larsrc3• 4 years ago

Surely not Internet Exploder?

mk893• 4 years ago

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

gavinray4• 4 years ago

That project options tool is pretty neat, thanks for sharing!

ackfoobar• 4 years ago

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

Rust's traits are typeclasses. Scala's traits are like Java interfaces but more.

gpderetta• 4 years ago

FWIW the concept feature of c++20 has very little in common with rust traits. C++ concepts are closer to type assertions and aren't really a type system for templates.

The old c++0x concepts proposal was much closer (and of course precedes them), bit turned out it was harder to make it work.

badpun3• 4 years ago

Let's add the fact that no IDE right now fully supports C++ 20. Visual Studio comes closest, but for example modules still don't really work well.

pjmlp10• 4 years ago

They work good enough that I only use modules on my hobby coding since VS 2022 got released.

fsloth2• 4 years ago

C11 resources are just fine to start with. That will bring you to "modern C++".

C++ is not about bleeding edge. Nor is it about being a good, modern language.

It's key feature is to be able to tweak performance based on profiler data.

So, you want to write code you understand well enough, so you can adapt it based on the feedback profiler gives you.

If you don't need to write code that needs to get every last bit of performance, or you don't have to use some specific libraries, or maintain some legacy code, there is no reason to use C++.

Also, a humorous rant:

1.5 years? I've been programming C++ professionally for 15 years and it's still a daily struggle. It's a minefield of footguns, within which are buried unexploded munitions from previous generations, all administered by a posse of savants gleefully adding more and more convolutions to the language to "modernize" it.

I have to also Google what headers cstd/std stuff comes from all the time

greyhair8• 4 years ago

Never memorize the things you can find in documentation, or through tooling.

bogomipz• 4 years ago

I would be interested in hearing what modern resources you have been using that have been helpful and which ones you would recommend.

rock_artist• 4 years ago

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. It can be Haskell, cpp, python. I doesn't matter.

A real engineer should understand at least basic concepts of how a CPU works, memory concepts including manual alloc/dealloc. So languge is a fraction of your time.

I've "learned" Java in my university and did a C course. I've started without knowing any C++. But since working at my current place, I write only CPP.

There's infinite learning curve but that's with any language (or knowledge in any field)

harimau777• 4 years ago

Personally, I'm currently transitioning from functional oriented JavaScript to Object Oriented PHP and I'm struggling a lot with the different paradigm. It feels like everything happens by magic rather than according to the neatly organized assembly lines that I'm used to.

pyb4• 4 years ago

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

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

It's not that the pool is running dry, it's that they're burning through the pool. Places like banks and most hedge funds are usually really bad to work for, and they aren't paying that well compared to FAANGs and unicorns (who they are competing with for talent). The exception is a few of the HFTs: they can have good engineering-focused cultures, but you will still work 50 hours per week or more.

These companies are more selective about who they hire than FB, Netflix, or Google, and almost universally, the talent they want is having them bid against very high-paying tech companies.

The last few times I spoke to a recruiter, I asked for salaries over $500k because that would make it worth it to go there instead of staying at Google - I was making more than half that at G, and working 20-30 hours a week. Most of them said that they would not offer near that. The ones that would wanted me to be the next coming of Bjarne (in terms of C++ knowledge) to pay that rate. They were hiring a lot of people from defense contractors at the time.

Anecdotally, a lot of developers who enter one of those firms early and stay tend to get to the $500k-1M range pretty easily, but they seem to be a lot less willing to hire in that range. Comparatively, Google and Meta are happy to make $400k+ offers.

yewenjie• 4 years ago

How hard is it to learn only the modern part of C++ coming from a high-level language world?

jmnicolas2• 4 years ago

Unless proved otherwise I always assumes that when employers say there's a shortage of any skilled labour they just mean they can't find someone cheap enough.

deathanatos• 4 years ago

Exactly this. I know C++; I'm not using that knowledge. So, there's at least me in the talent pool. And my inbox continues to indicate that recruiters are anything but serious about hiring.

Decabytes• 4 years ago

I'd love to learn C++ and jump ship from the Data Science job I work, but I'm not even sure where I would start. Sure there are lots of videos about programming in Modern C++ but the reality is none of the codebases you work on will probably use. And a lot of places just use a subset of C++ or just C with classes, so then how much of C++ do I actually need to know? That coupled with the fact that they are paid less, makes me think I should just learn a python web framework since I already know python, and some Html and CSS and just apply to a python job

didgetmaster• 4 years ago

C++ is my favorite language. When I started my 'side project' (a new kind of data management system called Didgets) I used it exclusively.

Before I semi-retired to work on the project full-time, I would sometimes check out the help-wanted postings for various software companies. It became more and more rare to see a job posting that focused on C++ skills. Systems level programming and being able to write very performant code does not seem to be nearly as high a priority today.

_jezell_• 4 years ago

WASM will bring back a lot of the web devs to native, but C++ via ecmascripten sucks balls compared to the alternatives.

justinlloyd• 4 years ago

I can code in C++, have been coding in C++ since it was first released, and C before that, on almost ever conceivable platform and processor. I've done some seriously hard-core systems programming, hard real-time work, deep embedded kernel level projects, and stupendously fast algorithms. But the thing is, I can get paid 2x to 3x as much to write Python or Typescript, and I'm not in some toxic fintech/cryptobro environment. Every employer that has hired me for my C++ has been "not chill" and just outright toxic at times, and the pay is crap. Why put myself through that?

Footnote: I've heard the same nonsense about not enough COBOL programmers (I've reluctantly done quite a bit of COBOL over the years) with companies desperate to hire and will pay $$$ for the privilege of retaining them, but when I talk to these desperate companies willing to pay top rates for a decent COBOL developer, I find out they are offering less than I was making 20 years ago and choke when I say "to get me to move, you'd need to pay at least 10% more than what I currently make."

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B• 4 years ago

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.

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

....Excellent?

MattPalmer1086• 4 years ago

I had the most fun ever writing c++ 20 years ago. The power of the language amazed me, combining high level constructs with low level control and many, many (too many) powerful features. And so many ways to completely screw yourself up.

I vowed never to use it again. I miss it still but it's just not worth it.

rufius• 4 years ago

This seems like a good thing frankly. C++ sucks to work in (I have 10 years exp with it professionally). I’d never start a new project in C++. Maybe C for an exotic arch, but not C++.

Good riddance.

strangattractor2• 4 years ago

Sort of like complaining the talented Cobol and Fortran developers are running sry.

wojciii• 4 years ago

I spent some time developing i c++ 10 years back or so. I really don't want to use OOP. I fucking hate OOP. No amount of money will make my use C++ again.

These days I do embedded programming in C with some Python on the side. As a plus the nightmares about debugging c++ code disappeared.

kaizendad2• 4 years ago

This is good, right? There are better languages for most (although certainly not all) purposes, whether you measure "better" through features like memory-safety or through developer happiness or anything in between.

Most of the systems that were written in C++ in the past didn't have to be written in C++. Now they'll become hard to support, because they are in fact hard to support, and eventually they will be refactored or rewritten.

Same thing happened with Assembly and COBOL programs being written into C++.

jleahy4• 4 years ago

Unfortunately high frequency trading is an area where C++ is normally the right choice, even for a new project.

varajelle3• 4 years ago

Why not rust?

kaizendad2• 4 years ago

Fair, I hope I was clear in my post that I don't mean to say C++ is never the right choice, but... rarely.

tdiff• 4 years ago

Many people here compare c++ jobs to, say, js jobs mentioning that the latter are easier and at the same time pay more. I wonder if all them really dont care what they do as long as the wage is large enough.

I tend to think that in many cases one would deal with something more interesting/involving while working on a cpp project than on a python web app.

glonq• 4 years ago

I wrote in C++ for a good chunk of my programming career. I'm a manager/architect now, but if you forced me back into programming I'd much rather use C# or Rust than C++ again.

ninefathom2• 4 years ago

To quote Yogi Berra, "it's déjà vu all over again."

Those of us of a certain vintage remember this precise issue with Fortran a couple decades ago, and those out there of a certain further vintage probably remember it with COBOL. So on and so forth back through PL/I, Algol, and so on to the dawn of time.

While there have certainly been consequences of the dearth of COBOL and Fortran devs, ultimately the world has thus far survived. We'll survive the obsolescence of C++ (if indeed that's what this is).

zabzonk11• 4 years ago

cobol, fortran, pl/i and algol are all pretty much of the same vintage

ninefathom2• 4 years ago

Of origin, certainly, though they experienced very different curves of decline, which seems more pertinent in this case

ezoe• 4 years ago

I have no interest on HFT or crypto currency the article says lacking C++ programmers. I consider them ponzi scheme. It doesn't create any value to the society to me.

icedchai• 4 years ago

I've had C++ projects at work over the years, and generally despise the language (it feels too complex.) I actively avoid it. C is fine. C++, no thanks.

Suro• 4 years ago

I did my time in C++, had fun, learnt plenty, then got an offer to do some python with a way better salary. At some point company have to seriously up their offer if they want me to care about ABI breakage, weird bug cause by undefined behavior, and the usual 100k loc of legacy code with 10+MB sized object and no coherent memory ownership.

throwaway2342u• 4 years ago

C++ employers won't hire without a BS/MS in CS/EE, even with 18 years of freelance & opensource.

I made the switch to Rust and Go and the concern was never raised.

Farewell C++.

greyhair8• 4 years ago

And where is the love for ANSI C?

As an embedded systems developer for 38 years, with 26 years writing for small threaded RTOS, including 16 and 32 bit DSPs, and the remainder being platform work on QNX Neutrino, NetBSD, and Linux, most of my code has been K&R, then ANSI C.

A very small amount of C++, but by comparison, a very small amount.

Everything else, Shell, Perl, Python, is a shadow by comparison.

butterisgood• 4 years ago

I find a subset of C++ to be pretty enjoyable to use to be honest. But I think if I hadn’t cut my programming teeth on it so early in my life I would probably share the opinion of most of my coworkers about how it’s a bit of a monstrosity.

It’s difficult to argue that it isn’t.

antonb90• 4 years ago

This is interesting to see. I don’t use c++ professionally but I have started to use it in my spare time for some side projects.

I find it interesting as it gives a lot of control over OS primitives.

One thing I found a little odd was the various different ways to build and import third party libraries. Finding the include directories and linking the libraries can be a pain.

I use cmake and ninja which seems to be somewhat easier to wrangle with.

weatherlite2• 4 years ago

Have to say this threat really took me by surprise. I was seriously considering moving from web dev (ruby/python etc) to C++ or even C to increase my job security. I guess the feeling many devs have of job insecurity and/or frustration with constant changes and becoming obsolete and/or burned out is inherent to the field. Back to the drawing board...

ilirium2• 4 years ago

One more reason why: there is no job for Juniors, Middle and Senior. Only such as 10+ years of experience with a narow specialization, this is not for Senior, it is for Senior++ ;)

2 decades ago, there were plenty of jobs for newcomers: shareware desktop apps for Windows, growing CAD/EDA/simulation tools, small and middle-sized games, and enterprise apps. Today there is no room for desktop apps for Windows, CAD/EDA/simulation seems stagnant, games require Unreal/Unity/Godot with their own languages, and enterprises used C# and Java.

Embedded C++ positions differ from "General C++ Senior++ Engineer". Yes, they are welcome for novices, but they use their own subset of C++ of an outdated language version, and you cannot grow with them, because the size of a project is small and after 10+ years you cannot be Senior++ with required rare specialization (and of course low salaries).

What else leaves for novices to get more experience? Only writing and supporting your own open-source project with a few users (or no user base at all) during a decade… So, it is not an option for many people.

taylodl• 4 years ago

My personal anecdote. I used to be a top-notch C++ developer, if I do say so myself. I was able to quote the ARM by chapter and verse as it were. I left C++ a little over 20 years ago. Honestly, Java had gotten to the point it could do everything I needed to do. I've stayed abreast with the changes in C++11, 14, and 17 - but only out of curiosity. I really wouldn't want to go back to that world.

If I were starting new and needed a systems language I wouldn't even think about C++. Rust would be my choice, no question about it - and I'm certainly not a Rust fanboi by any means! As others have mentioned I'd use Rust just for Cargo alone! Seriously, package management for C++ is, was and will probably forever be an absolute mess. Who wants to go back to that?

Now that I think about it that's the difference between "legacy" languages and "modern" languages - dependency and artifact management. In modern languages I expect that to be taken care of uniformly regardless of operating environment. The legacy languages do not do this. This is akin to the separation of classical and modern physics based off quantum theory.

That's why new developers don't want to use "legacy" languages and even many of us older ones don't want to mess around with those environments anymore! Too much work is involved in maintaining your tools rather than getting work done!

NoZZz• 4 years ago

It's too elitist now.

rafaelvasco• 4 years ago

If having a VM/GC is acceptable then C# is the overall best language/framework today, meaning that it ranges from good to great in everything: Web, Game Dev, Desktop Dev, Mobile etc. Otherwise there's no general contender. With C#, these days you can go for unsafe code and dealing with native code in safer ways using new/ish features of the language: Span/Memory, refs, ref attributes etc. Or just use good old pointers directly and manage everything yourself.

The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

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