C++ Development work

[abridgel]

Hi All:

I am considering a career change - currently I work in IT as a Release/Build Engineer at a large corporation. The money is pretty good and the people are nice but the environment is crazy busy and I find myself doing a lot of administrative tasks that do not contribute to my technical knowledge.

I have about 5 years experience at my job right now and 6-7 in the industry. I am however considering a career change into C++ development work as I hear that people with knowledge of the language and algorithms have very interesting work and get paid decently.

Only problem is I have no experience in C++.

This post is more of reach-out to any C++ developers on the board. Just wondering how do you find your job? Is it challenging - do you wake up every morning with a zest for life?

I'd love to hear about your experience and if any advice comes along about how I can potentially make a career change I'd love that as well

THANKS IN ADVANCE.

[x86asm]

I would definitely be interested in doing this kind of work as well!

[vavaju]

Why bother with C++?

The future with Microsoft is at .NET and C#. WCF is getting more traction now, and it will all lead up to Microsoft's next big thing, Oslo, which will involve a lot of visual programming (a la BizTalk Orchestrations).

[abridgel]

Google uses heavy C++.

[vavaju]

Google uses heavy C++.

Sure, but that's them.

There are a lot more opportunities if you are familiar with C# rather than C++. You'll need to know C# if you want to do anything in .NET

[d00n]

What is your development experience? Both professionally and in your spare time?

I can see opportunities where C++ is more interesting than C#, such as in embedded environments. A lot of scientific and financial systems probably still rely heavily on C++. A lot of cool geometry stuff too, I guess, like MATLAB and video games.

But in the end, OOP is OOP. If you want to do the more interesting stuff, you need to prove you are more mathematically-inclined... y'know, modeling of Klee-Minty polytopes (or insert other random jargon here) and stuff like that. If you want the difficult problems, I think you need to show you can handle them, regardless of language first.

Otherwise, C++ is just another means to do the sort of large unwieldy software systems that you do with C#, Java et al.

So really, before talking languages, what sort of work are you looking for?

[abridgel]

I think quantitative models interest me - I did fairly well in stats in university

[unowned]

I think quantitative models interest me - I did fairly well in stats in university

are you looking for more of a quant/finance related role?...if so, forget about c# then...

[abridgel]

Yes that is the way I am leaning

Seems more interesting to me.

Have no idea where to begin though.

[rilles]

Do you prefer to code in Windows or Unix?

Microsoft heavily pushes their .net platform, Unix will probably be dominated by c/c++.

[Nyte]

I find the actual work you do matters a lot more than what language you do it in.

[Quiggie]

Quant devs make crazy money but the math skills required to be one are very high. I don't think a CS degree alone is sufficient, they are looking for people with both a CS degree and a math or physics degree.

[skyrink]

how many years will C++ be around? don't programming languages change every few years? its best to keep up to date and know many languages.....right?

[movieman]

how many years will C++ be around?

COBOL is still around... C++ won't disappear any time soon. But, as mentioned, C# is likely to take over for GUI apps on Windows.

[Nyte]

how many years will C++ be around? don't programming languages change every few years? its best to keep up to date and know many languages.....right?

Most of the stuff you're using is written in C++ and will be for years to come. Being a developer is not about how many languages you know.

[mike24]

I don't think a beginner should attempt to learn a programming language, rather it's better to understand object oriented design. Then you will be able to learn C++, Java, C# or any modern object oriented language fairly quickly.

We see many of these "Teach yourself this... in 24 Hours" books, but they do a bad job at teaching programming. They focus on trying to understand which command does what, instead of teaching the reader to think logically. I found programming intellectually rewarding by first understanding the logical process to program.

[andrew2good4u]

I don't think a beginner should attempt to learn a programming language, rather it's better to understand object oriented design. Then you will be able to learn C++, Java, C# or any modern object oriented language fairly quickly.

We see many of these "Teach yourself this... in 24 Hours" books, but they do a bad job at teaching programming. They focus on trying to understand which command does what, instead of teaching the reader to think logically. I found programming intellectually rewarding by first understanding the logical process to program.

I couldn't agree more. Programming in a new language shouldn't be extremely difficult if you were taught programming theory as well. Once you know how to lay out and design whatever project you are doing, it will be as simple as figuring out commands with google searches

[drey2k]

Why not Java?

[scan]

COBOL is still around... C++ won't disappear any time soon. But, as mentioned, C# is likely to take over for GUI apps on Windows.

Cobol is only around because of mainframes and mainframes will never go away because of banks. This theory doesn't work with all languages though. Don't mislead someone with that statement.

[spideyyy]

it's true there are a lot of new languages that are much easier to maintain, but there are things C++/C can do that other languages can't.

With C++/C the programmer has the flexibility to write more efficient code, but it is more prone to programmer errors (e.g. it leaves the programmer to control memory management..etc)

as for learning C++ from scratch, I think anybody can do it. But as with any other type of technical job, there is going to be a learning curve. It is definitely interesting work but it also depends on the project that is given to you and the people you work with.

[heri0n]

C# is garbage, you'll be locked into MS platforms... Whereas C/C++, Java are available on most modern platforms. You might as well Java since its more universal than C# and C# is just a ripoff of Java anyway. And as the others say, the language is just a tool. Once you learn one, you should be able to pick up others fairly quickly.

[teoconca]

Hi All:

I am considering a career change - currently I work in IT as a Release/Build Engineer at a large corporation. The money is pretty good and the people are nice but the environment is crazy busy and I find myself doing a lot of administrative tasks that do not contribute to my technical knowledge.

I have about 5 years experience at my job right now and 6-7 in the industry. I am however considering a career change into C++ development work as I hear that people with knowledge of the language and algorithms have very interesting work and get paid decently.

Only problem is I have no experience in C++.

This post is more of reach-out to any C++ developers on the board. Just wondering how do you find your job? Is it challenging - do you wake up every morning with a zest for life?

I'd love to hear about your experience and if any advice comes along about how I can potentially make a career change I'd love that as well

THANKS IN ADVANCE.

I would recommend you to consider this very careful and hard. If you consider to switch to programming then there are cons and pros.
Pros:
- very challenging as you are very involved with different projects
- very challenging as you will learn different skills and tools for coding
- very rewarded as the products release
Cons
- very hard and challenging as the products/applications are in the analyzing and coding stages
- very demanding as you will need to understand and readily produce solution
- as the market changes which is right now coding and developing skill is being sent away to countries like India, China, Eastern Europe, etc. Trend is being outsourced as costs in those countries are cheaper.

There are more pros and cons you can think of but these are my main points. At this stage in your life, you already have few years of good skills and experience under your belt. Why don't you use it to get to management. That skill and job can be used anywhere and companies. That job will not be outsourced...Good luck on your future.

[B0000rt]

COBOL is still around... C++ won't disappear any time soon. But, as mentioned, C# is likely to take over for GUI apps on Windows.

Yes, but who develops OS based apps these days? They're mostly all Web Apps developed, so Flex and AJAX based apps are the future.

I wanted to do embedded development out of school, but the job market for this area is tiny compared to what I am doing now, Java based web services (SOAP, Hessian or BlazeDS for Flex)

[danfromwaterloo]

Consider your future when deciding on a coding path - C++ is a language that is quickly fading into the past. Yes, there will always be jobs for it, but you want to align your skillset with the "current" of demand, not against it.

The predominant languages in today's world are the .NET langauges and the Java family. Learn one family, and it will open you up to a very large subset of the world's programming jobs. Also, learn SQL - always a valuable language to learn in order to mine data.

[movieman]

Yes, but who develops OS based apps these days?

Everyone I know in software development and everyone who writes the apps that I use on a daily basis. The problem with web apps is two-fold: a) they mostly suck and b) they won't run if you don't have a network connection; while there are certainly good uses for them I can't help but feel that those two problems are going to ensure that 'real' applications will be around for a very long time yet.

As for C++ dying rapidly, there are large amounts of code that's still written in C and hasn't even progressed to C++ yet, and there is vast amounts of C++ code in applications that will be around for a very long time. If there was a problem with my comparison to COBOL it's that there's probably far less COBOL code than C++ which will have to be supported for years to come.

I wanted to do embedded development out of school, but the job market for this area is tiny compared to what I am doing now, Java based web services (SOAP, Hessian or BlazeDS for Flex)

And there are a heck of a lot more Java programmers in the market competing with you.

[Spock311]

Hi All:

I am considering a career change - currently I work in IT as a Release/Build Engineer at a large corporation. The money is pretty good and the people are nice but the environment is crazy busy and I find myself doing a lot of administrative tasks that do not contribute to my technical knowledge.

I have about 5 years experience at my job right now and 6-7 in the industry. I am however considering a career change into C++ development work as I hear that people with knowledge of the language and algorithms have very interesting work and get paid decently.

Only problem is I have no experience in C++.

This post is more of reach-out to any C++ developers on the board. Just wondering how do you find your job? Is it challenging - do you wake up every morning with a zest for life?

I'd love to hear about your experience and if any advice comes along about how I can potentially make a career change I'd love that as well

THANKS IN ADVANCE.

Don't restrict yourself to c++. Come on man, don't be a language fanboy.

[Spock311]

Google uses heavy C++.

Google also uses a shitton of python.