Do you consider senior C++ programmer to be "better" or more "knowledgeable" programmer compared to managed or webdev programmer ? (C#, Java, JS etc)

I think the skill sets exercised are different.

Background:

  1. I've spend 15 years of my career writing C/C++ code. I've held some combination of backend engineer / machine learning engineer jobs over the last few years.
  2. For some projects, including my current one, I do have to write some frontend code ( yay for being a founder ).
  3. If I am intellectually honest, I am not a good frontend / product engineer. I've always done well in jobs which have involved complex algorithms, highly efficient data infrastructure, distributed systems and pointer management for instance is second nature to me.
  4. When it comes to product engineering, I don't natively think well in "UI" space.
  5. For one of my jobs, I did some mobile development. I did come in thinking that it was in some ways conceptually easier but doing anything well is an art. And I was just not a good fit.
  6. It's not so much as the code, as much as it is the style of thinking that's different and it gave me tremendous appreciation for just how hard really good frontend development is. I for instance intrinsically think of algorithms and data structures, though UI and graphical manipulation and how to layer good UI in terms of code doesn't come to me easy.
  7. When you get into the deep end, there are complex concepts on both sides. They just have very different flavors.

So is the more experienced C++ developer going to know more about topics like pointer manipulation and memory management ? Yes.

But by the same token, a really good frontend engineer will know about lots of things I don't know about and for instance you can't do great pattern matching in my head around how to deally design and architect a great Javascript app so it's fast / testable / uses best practices.

Long story short: Both can be very complex in real applications, and it's not a productive conversation to say X engineers or Y engineers are better.

Know what you are good at and what you enjoy and focus if that works for you and go deep there, and don't worry about what someone else is doing.

/r/cpp Thread