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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

• heinekan 4y 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 4y 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..
    • jakesgates 4y ago
      I'll second this, I work as a low level C dev on embedded stuff. Good salary for the region, company pays embedded software devs at the same rate as high level app and web devs, and have somewhat flexible working conditions. This is just an anecdote I know, but I am very surprised at the general consensus at how bad the embedded positions are, it hasn't been my experience or my peers at least.
• speby 4y 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 4y ago
    In embedded you sell hardware, with web you sell software. Software scales a lot more than hardware, thus more revenues per employee.
    • speby 4y ago
      That makes complete sense! I wasn't even thinking about that angle.
  • thedracle 4y 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.
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      Yea, I moved from embedded to mobile (iOS) development pretty quickly. Similar problems/constraints but the tooling was an order of magnitude better. No more cobbling together non-working cross-compilers from some vendor's crappy BSP and praying they produced binaries that worked.
• shams93 4y 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).
• jart 4y ago
  Isn't it common for C++ devs in finance to make seven figure salaries?
  • hnews_account_1 4y 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.
  • sentinalien 4y ago
    Not really no, 7 figure roles are few and far between
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      but definitely 6 figure - i know i was, and that's going back years
      • bee_rider 4y ago
        The difference between 6 and 7 figures can be 7 figures. I guess you must mean a high 6 though?
  • kevstev 4y 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...
• cmrdporcupine 4y 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.
  • antegamisou 4y ago
    You may also look into Kernel Programming for a lucrative systems programming career. It is more C and low-level oriented though.
    • anonymousDan 4y ago
      Interesting, what types of companies pay well for kernel programming?
      • synergy20 4y ago
        not many, I did it, jobs are scarce, most of the time you port a new version of CPU to the kernel, or add a few device drivers, the industry does not need a lot of those engineers, and per my experience, not compensated that well either. these days many kernel programmers work for big companies.
      • antegamisou 4y ago
        I remember Apple having a lot of related listings so I'd assume companies that are somehow involved in OS development (Microsoft, Google, maybe RedHat/IBM and Intel).
      • 4y ago
• synergy20 4y 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 4y 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.
• mhfu 4y 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 4y 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.
    • PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      Agreed. My friend - a kernel dev - and I - a non-specialized SDE - have the same benefits and flexible hours.
  • electrondood 4y 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.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • WorldMaker 4y ago
• mschuster91 4y 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.
  • zabzonk 4y 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.
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      Investment banks aren't your typical consumer banks though - less red tape (because they're not consumer banks), less historical baggage (consumer banks have accounts that are sometimes well over a century old, which makes everything that touches account data incredibly sensitive as the data needs to be always consistent), and way more money available. There's a reason why a lot of advances in communication came from the needs of the investment banks, particularly specialized hedge funds / "quant banks".
• PragmaticPulp 4y 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)
  • Jtsummers 4y 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.
    • AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      It might also be that the management chains in embedded are likely former engineers or EE people. In Web you get a lot of management interfaces where the boss can't do their job: that's the perfect recipe for high pay. In embedded and other non-software engineering but engineering firms, the management is typically engineers that CAN do their subordinates jobs, they just don't want to.
• zabzonk 4y 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 4y 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.
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      all those companies you mention seem to me to have a 50/50 chance of going down the tubes. not because of their use of ruby, of course. still, i don't see any company started today to base their software on ruby. probably just me being wrong.
      • ativzzz 4y ago
        as a rails dev, if I were to start a new project today I would still pick rails. It makes building web apps a breeze. The technology is mature, stable, active and still staying modern in terms of integration with modern JS you start running into problems as you scale, but the reality is you will run into scaling problems regardless of what technology you use, and the ability to move quickly and iterate is much more important for new projects than solving scaling problems before they exist
        • DeathArrow 4y ago
          >as a rails dev, if I were to start a new project today I would still pick rails. It makes building web apps a breeze. It's also a breeze if you use .NET and it will run circles around the Ruby app.
• the_only_law 4y 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.
• brrrrrm 4y 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_ 4y 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 4y ago
  I would guess Microsoft's push for C#/.Net is affecting this as well.
  • Gibbon1 4y ago
    There are a lot of projects written in C++/Python/NodeJS/Go/Ruby that really should be written in C#/.net.
• chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby. But these are all implemented in C++ or C? Those aren't low-paying jobs.
  • maxloh 4y 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.
    • chrisseaton 4y ago
      > In the meantime, JavaScript and Python is a lot easier to work with, with a higher salary. I don't know - I legitimately think programming languages are simpler than web applications. Mostly stateless, mostly a big pure function. Compared to the anarchy and chaos of web services seems easy.
  • cortesoft 4y ago
    No one is paying the implementers of those languages
    • chrisseaton 4y ago
      > No one is paying the implementers of those languages Lol what? Yes they are. I literally work with a whole team of them! Teams at Goole, Apple, Mozilla, etc etc as well.
      • dspillett 4y ago
        OK, few are actively recruiting for people on those projects, as a proportion of the whole job market. A few juicy jobs there and a huge pile of less well paying ones means that any average is going to be low. The existence of those roles is great for those that have/get them, but this doesn't help the wider pool who need to use other tech to get the better wages – a situation that results in fewer newly training in c++ because those outside the pool see the low average.
• UncleOxidant 4y 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.
  • ativzzz 4y ago
    Yup and as we know we don't get paid based on the difficulty of the problem we are solving.
  • BeetleB 4y 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 4y 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.
  • 4y ago
• analognoise 4y ago
  I've discovered this and am trying to move into pretty much anything web related.
• scruple 4y 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.
• maxloh 4y ago
  Interpreted languages are also more flexible and easier to work with.
• clum 4y 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.
  • FredPret 4y ago
    It’s survival of the fittest in the market and sounds like these companies aren’t it
  • Sakos 4y 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.
  • germandiago 4y 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.
• lazypenguin 4y 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?
  • DeathArrow 4y 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.
    • lazypenguin 4y ago
      Why would you dismiss my comment on my presumed experience? Seems a bit arrogant. Did I say all backend problems are easier or that all C++ problems are harder? No, I merely stated why work on hard C++ problems for less pay when one can work on easier backend problems for more pay.
      • intelVISA 4y ago
        Wasn't even a good comparison either, would be like calling a Ferrari the same speed as a push-bike because you saw the former driving slowly alongside the latter.
    • kevstev 4y ago
      I did low level C/C++ stuff in the algo trading world until 2014, and since then have done a plethora of other things from node.js for a BIG e-commerce player, python, cloud architecture, SRE type stuff, etc... and every single job has been an absolute cakewalk compared to fighting against the various footguns and headaches C++ has to offer. No more fighting huge object hierarchies and having to put in hacks because making a change to the base class would require half the company to recompile, no more migraines from template compiler errors vomiting out on my screen, debugging template metaprograms, memory leaks, "oh crap this copy constructor doesn't do what I assumed it would do " type errors, "I have to read 10 different files worth of code to track down whether this legacy library is going to delete the object for me or I have to do it myself" headaches, dealing with huge build times, etc... I could go on. C++ is essentially 4 different languages rolled into one (C, C with classes/OOP, templates, template metaprogramming), and while I am sure greenfield entirely modern C++ projects exist and are a bit nicer to deal with, they are unicorns for most devs out there using the language daily.
• AtlasBarfed 4y 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!
• jasmer 4y 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.
  • thedracle 4y 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.
    • jasmer 4y ago
      I agree. But I think it'll be hard to see Rust really make progress until hardware makers worldwide start really doing 'Rust First'. And the problem there, is that Rust is a bit inaccessible to many. Rust trades of absolutely everything for performance - and that's just not the trade-off we want to make in most scenarios. Even for most embedded systems - something that's easy to program, easy to read, easy to support, great tooling etc. is worth more than a 'a bit faster performance'. If we were to have created something ideal for embedded systems, it would not be Rust. I think it'd be a bit more like Go. Or just like a 'Safe C' with a lot better built-in libraries. I like Rust but I fear it is not 'the one' and the bandwagon has already left the station so we have to go with it.
      • steveklabnik 4y ago
        ARM is a member of the Rust Foundation. Expressif has started actively paying someone to write Rust libraries for their chips. Long way to go, of course.
• nprateem 4y ago
  And C++ is difficult & confusing. Other more modern languages have easier toolchains and fewer gotchas.
• onlyrealcuzzo 4y 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.
  • goalieca 4y 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”.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      Dozens of highly profitable public tech companies? There's really on APPL, GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, FB. Pinterest, AirBNB, Adobe, Intuit, Snap, Roblox, etc are usually a pretty big drop in pay - but usually above all but the highest of high paying startups. The vast majority of actual cloud jobs - building cloud infrastructure - are low-level - not Python. Are you talking about startups using AWS? I'm not sure that's a "cloud" job.
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    Not according to latest developer survey by Stack Overflow.
• bsder 4y 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.
  • galangalalgol 4y 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 4y 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++.
• melony 4y 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 4y 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.
• opportune 4y 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.
• intelVISA 4y ago
  The life hack here is to pick up a handful of web jobs and keep C++ for leisure.
• benttoothpaste 4y 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.