Can becoming a C++ expert ruin your engineering career?

If you’re applying to one of the top paying software development jobs in finance, chances are they want experience in C++. The sad truth is that most engineers who consider themselves experts in the language won’t come close to those positions. Even in low-latency C++, a niche subsection of the language, financial services headhunter Peter Wagner says “there’s low-latency and then there’s low-latency.”

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In a viral post on Hacker News, C++ veterans seem to believe learning C++ has crippled their career prospects. One engineer said they “hate it, and feel like it’s a lot of useless knowledge.” One with ten years of C++ experience called the language a “bottomless pit.” 

Others suggest taking efforts to improve your C++ knowledge can be a significant sunk cost. “Many people who have been writing C++ poorly for decades never learn to do it better,” said one, while another said C++ developers “have the smallest range of programming language knowledge” of any language specialist, making it difficult to find work utilizing other languages. 

They’ll likely have difficulty finding jobs in C++ too. Despite being the 2nd most popular language on the TIOBE index, it doesn’t even come close to the top 10 of our most popular languages in financial services job listings.

Ironically, committing yourself to C++ can also make your future self worse at C++. One engineer said, “I don’t find that fluency in any other languages (including C++ from 10 years ago) translates well to fluency with C++.” Another said some veteran C++ coders “developed bad habits” based on older version of the language, ill-suited to today. 

One such bad habit is the prioritization of performance over function regardless of goals. One engineer said C++ developers “usually write code which is efficient but hard to understand, even when effectiveness is not a part of the requirements.”

Committing yourself to a language with minimal career prospects is all too common in finance. Q engineers using KDB frequently lament the choice to learn it while even at Jane Street, one of the top paying algorithmic trading firms, engineers who learn OCAML find their experience doesn’t always transfer well to other jobs. 

Learning C++ just because an elite few job listings pay crazy money is a terrible mistake, but that shouldn’t dissuade the truly elite programmers from giving the language a try. Ultimately, in contexts such as high frequency trading, there’s nothing that works better than C++ (except maybe Rust, but that’s a whole other debate). The question is, are you good enough?

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