If you’re applying for one of the highest-paying software development jobs in finance, you’ll likely be asked to have experience with C++. Sadly, most engineers who consider themselves experts in the language don’t get the job. Even in low-latency C++, a niche subsection of the language, financial services headhunter Peter Wagner says, “There are many different kinds of low latency.”
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According to a trending post on Hacker News, C++ veterans believe that learning C++ has hurt their career prospects: “I hate C++ and feel like there’s a lot of useless knowledge,” said one engineer. Another engineer with 10 years of C++ experience called the language a “bottomless pit.”
Some have pointed out that making the effort to improve your C++ knowledge can be a big sunk cost: “Many people who can’t write C++ well for decades never learn to write it better,” one said, while another noted that C++ developers have a harder time finding work in other languages because they have “a narrower range of programming language knowledge than any language expert.”
Finding a job in C++ is also probably difficult: despite being the second most popular language in the TIOBE index, it’s not even close to making the top 10 most popular languages in financial services job listings.
Ironically, focusing on C++ may even make you worse at it in the future. As one engineer put it, “I don’t see how fluency in other languages (including 10-year-old C++) translates to fluency in C++.” Another engineer said some veteran C++ programmers “picked up bad habits” based on older versions of the language that aren’t relevant today.
One such bad habit is prioritizing performance over functionality regardless of the goal: As one engineer put it, C++ developers “usually write efficient but hard-to-understand code, even when effectiveness is not part of the requirements.”
It’s all too common in finance to commit to a language that offers few career prospects: Q engineers who use KDB often regret their choice to learn it, while even at Jane Street, one of the highest-paying algorithmic trading firms, engineers who learned OCAML find that their experience doesn’t always transfer well to other jobs.
It would be a big mistake to learn C++ just because a few elite job ads are paying a ridiculous amount of money, but that shouldn’t deter truly elite programmers from trying the language. After all, in a context like high-frequency trading, nothing is better than C++ (except maybe Rust, but that’s a whole other discussion). The question is, are you good enough?
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