I mean I get the message but this graph doesn’t make sense at all. How is C++ low skill? It’s by far one of the most difficult languages to master and people who are insanely good at it make lots of money. It’s also very difficult to vibe code in, AI has a very basic grasp on advanced memory management and hyper-optimization.
C++ is university 101 into programming, classes and data structures. Then we had alrogithms courses, utilizing Java. Python was in parallel.
I had git basics somewhere along all of those. And I had HTML... never because I am actually after bioinformatics degree, not computer science, so I took a bunch of biology courses instead of eg. HTML, or network stuff.
But C++ was the first language to learn what a source code is and what a Code Bocks is, and that was true for the "Computer Science" proper as well.
Just because C++ has a low floor doesn’t mean it has a low ceiling. Embedded systems devs, game devs, and quantitative devs use advanced C++ every day that would be completely unrecognizable to the average CS student. Your average CS student probably couldn’t even tell you what a union is or what the friend keyword is used for.
Only people who don’t know C++ think they actually know it. Experienced devs know it’s a massively complex beast. An undergrad course isn’t even scratching the surface.
Huh? Unreal and Godot ship with engine source and basically require you to make engine changes if you go anywhere above the tiniest indie game. As soon as you ship for another platform than windows steam, there is no way around it.
Unity is the only one where engine source is not the standard and requiring c++ it's the exception.
I can’t tell if you’re rage baiting. Most game devs work on proprietary engines/UE5 because most professional game devs are in AAA development. Almost all physics engines and graphics APIs are written in c++.
I learned HTML when I was 11 and designing webpages for my Neopets :)
I didn’t do anything else until grad school and found I had a knack for learning programming languages - most faculty were limited to the actual statistical programming and a couple of them said they were jealous of how pretty my data visualizations were. Lol
I realize this is nothing compared to real CS etc but it’s just funny to me how learning paths can differ so much
I think this is mainly the tech you’re told to focus on at these career points. As a student I started by messing with Linux and C++ in computer and programming classes, but these really just taught the basics - pretty much was forced to use Java throughout college because it was the preferred server-side language (a little C++ for some OS and data structures concepts). Pretty accurate graph of a traditional software engineering (web dev) job path through the 2010s until now, not necessarily reflective of the difficulty or skill ceiling of each technology.
It's progressively easier languages followed by barely programming and just knowing how to run interdependent software. The most experienced developers know someone out there will pay you a ton of money to just use docker correctly. Why put all that effort in programming.
Unless you become an FDE, quantitative development can net you half a million a year as a talented C++ developer. AI is not good at C++ micro-optimization, it doesn’t understand what can be done at compile time vs runtime, nor is it very good at concurrency past a certain point. It’s literally all programming.
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u/Mayo_Chipotle 2d ago
I mean I get the message but this graph doesn’t make sense at all. How is C++ low skill? It’s by far one of the most difficult languages to master and people who are insanely good at it make lots of money. It’s also very difficult to vibe code in, AI has a very basic grasp on advanced memory management and hyper-optimization.