[CliffyA]

As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs.

If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

[okatsu]

Please don't spread generalizations like these. I'm sorry about the job situation in your area but I live in a Canadian metropolis where 1) there's no shortage of low-level work and 2) they will pay much more than your average PHP consulting shop. In fact, I maxed out very early what someone can hope to earn at my level of experience.

My point is that your job market is not representative of the whole world and you're acting as if it were.

[chocolatebunny]

what the flying fuck. I live in Toronto and all I see is cloud this and cloud that. I'm an embedded software guy with a lot of embedded software experience and the only people who contact me in Linkedin focus on the one or two lines in my resume about web development.

[sdflkd]

Yet if you did web development you'd (likely) be making 2X+ in America -- provided you were willing to move. Canada doesn't pay.

[kerny]

Which metropolis are you talking about?

[itsokimbatman]

So I can only speak for myself, but I've been exclusively working in low level C type work for the last 9 years. Think embedded, kernel dev, reverse engineering, etc. type stuff. I'm good enough at it, but hardly an expert.

I can't say I've ever lacked for work and I make $125k in a very low cost of living area, and if I wanted something new I could have interviews arranged tomorrow both where I currently live and pretty much any major US city.

It's probably not on the same scale as web dev, but there's also a lot fewer of us working on this side of things.

[branchless]

Do you have a background in electronic engineering / good understanding of hardware issues beyond cpu caching ? Just trying to understand what $125k requires in this space.

[samBergeron]

You're taking a very specific case and generalizing it like crazy. The CS industry isn't all Electron apps and simple jobs.

The most obvious example would be the video game industry were you're not straying very far from C++ anytime soon. Performance, speed and native compatibility are a big deal there.

There's definitely a valid career path there.

[randallsquared]

Games programmers are notoriously poorly paid, are they not? More fuel for the GP's fire, I think. :)

[nickpsecurity]

I went to college with a guy who did industrial, embedded stuff you see in factories. One of his projects he told me about was a robot that cut the glass windows or something like that at a Volvo plant. Anyway, he wrote the software for sensors, control, etc. Integrated it into GUI tools or backends. I said something kind of like you said to him.

He replied that he'd have better job security than any of us in IT doing stuff like PHP or Java. He said the reason is he had to be on-site to do his work. Impossible to out-source. When I pointed out in-sourcing (H1-B, etc), he said they preferred people with both strong command of English (avoid costly misunderstandings) and experience (avoid costly mistakes). The experience often comes from working locally in colleges or companies.

So, I definitely encourage people to explore coding in C and C++ for local, embedded systems at the least. There's other jobs that don't require local or embedded where those languages are used. They're not outsourcing-proof w/ consistently good pay, though. ;)

[kevin_thibedeau]

The problem is skill transfer. What does he do when Volvo shuts down his factory? Even if there are other potential employers nearby, they are unlikely to be hiring because they already have their guy.

[herewego]

Myself and my colleagues do a lot of work in finance and machine learning where low level C++ is king, and we are highly paid for knowing the language intimately. You can generalize this across many parts of the finance industry in my experience (I own a mid-sized ML consulting firm).

[taway_1212]

Interestingly, from what I'm seeing, in London even most HFT jobs are in Java now. From what I've read, they figure it's easier to write HFT Java than C++, which says a lot about their difficulties with C++ (not only the language itself, but difficulties with hiring people expert enough in C++).

[myth_drannon]

Depends on your location. Canada for example has very few embedded/hardware dev jobs vs. Israel were there is a huge amount of C/C++/Assembly jobs for the Aerospace/Military industry.

[Wazzymandias]

That's disappointing to hear but thank you for the honest response. I currently work in Ruby but my favorite language is C, I feel like it helped me become a better developer and improved my understanding of imperative languages. Sucks that something so useful is cast aside for something like PHP.

[aswanson]

Seconded. Low-level programming is not the future and the decreasing demand for said skill is reflected in the market/prospects.

[pdelbarba]

I respectfully disagree. We've recently seen a lot of development in the space and there will always be a need to make new hardware work. Yes, margins for hardware companies will always be slimmer than CloudWidgets Inc. but there's a very solid demand for people who know what they're doing in this space. Just about every electrically powered product you buy will have a uC in it, from your flashlight's led controller to the hundred+ that exist in your car.

[bogomipz]

Can I ask where you live? Maybe this was just the spot market at the time you were looking? That seems odd.

[CliffyA]

This is Melbourne, Australia.

I'm the following is not very scientific, but just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from.

Firstly comparing just the numbers of jobs (even tho this is probably a bad time of year near the holidays):

PHP Jobs, 100k/year minimum: 3 added today, 7 the day before https://www.seek.com.au/php-jobs/in-All-Melbourne-VIC?salary...

C++ Jobs, 100k/year min: 0 today, 1 yesterday https://www.seek.com.au/c%2B%2B-jobs/in-All-Melbourne-VIC?sa...

And some of those aren't even C++ jobs, switching sorting from date to relevant gets you C++ jobs from 14 days ago that would already have moved along in their hiring process.

As a cherry picked example, dropping down to 80k/year there's this Embedded C role that requires specific experience in card payment software: https://www.seek.com.au/job/33166443?type=standout&tier=no_t...

To me those requirements seem stricter than what i see in the PHP jobs (experience with MySQL + some form of MVC framework). And on top of that it's paying less.

Another example is the finance job I applied at that was paying 70-90k. But to get in the high end of that range you would need previous stock trading software experience. They also wanted 5 hours of my time for the interview process, but that's a separate topic.

[zerr]

This is mostly true for remote jobs.

[pdelbarba]

Yea, it's hard to work remote when you occasionally need $100K in test equipment to do your job

[gohardorgohome]

what... read: the trading firms / hedge funds developing their propriety trading platforms. Those salaries aren't too shabby.

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, C/C++ is gradually becoming a lost art. Many game developers don't even bother with it anymore, instead just scripting out Unity.

[s_ngularity]

I think that's probably true for indie game developers, but in the AAA space C++ is still king

[Optimal_Persona]

C/C++ is not going away anytime soon in realtime audio DSP.