I'm curious about why. It seems like the economics of supply and demand should make it so that C++ roles pay higher.
There's less C++ devs, C++ is harder, demand is still high. Why are the salaries low?
There's less C++ devs, C++ is harder, demand is still high. Why are the salaries low?
There are pockets of the C++ ecosystem where this isn't true (e.g. HFT).
But bottom-line, it's a business thing, not a skills thing. There are also a lot more C++ devs than the zeitgeist would suggest. Far too many to cause a "COBOL effect" where supply constraints on talent dictate market price.
If I am a C++ developer, in my late 50s, close to retirement, and know C++ fairly well, don't want to learn a brand new system which I won't be coding in for much longer, and already have my financials all set...
I won't be looking for that early retirement big cash payouts. I just want my flow of cash for a good retirement, to go on my vacations, and to buy gifts for the kids / grandkids.
I'd be willing to settle for a lower pay with low stress and solid job security.
Remember the desires of people later in life and those early in life aren't the same. If you got 10 more years of work left, you don't want to be in a high stakes high intensity work environment. I worked with one such man. He'd fall asleep while coding mid day. Nobody bothered him. He just chipped away at his projects at his own pace and was happy to not be bothered.
Sounds like such a company is looking for a boomer/genx who's still got skills and willing to settle for not being bothered too much.
COBOL got to where it is when there stopped being entry level jobs for it. Videogames keep a massive entry level door (full of "passion") open for C++. That's going to "naturally" keep C++ development salaries low for the foreseeable future.
Are there other sources (articles, research, blogposts) that talk about this?
> COBOL got to where it is when there stopped being entry level jobs for it. Videogames keep a massive entry level door (full of "passion") open for C++. That's going to "naturally" keep C++ development salaries low for the foreseeable future.
Not anymore.
I am frequenting gamedev forums, and reading gamedev chatter in general (seeing youtube videos on game conferences, presentations on games development, etc).
Maybe 1 in 10 of the people in these gamedev places actually program in C++. Mostly they'll use Unity (C#) or Unreal Engine Blueprints, with some Godot getting popular and a few statistical-noise engines being used (Love2d, etc).
What you are saying used to be true; on gamedev forums almost everyone used to be able to program in C++. Now very few do.
Yes, Unity is the default engine in the indie scene, but what are EA, Ubisoft, Embracer, Take Two, etc. hiring people to work with? Because these are the meat grinders who hire fresh college grads by the hundreds and work them like oxen until they burn out.
I wonder how many programmers are used at the AAA publishers. Maybe someone on HN who works as a gamedev (ISTR one or two people in the past saying that they worked for AAA developers) can answer that one.
(As an aside: I've got my eyes on FNA which just hit some milestones with using .NET 7 AOT for pure C# games on the major consoles. That's pretty exciting.)
Unreal is the truly wild one because to my understanding Unreal Engine Blueprints are a terrible half-baked not-quite-scripting language and most Unreal developers have to do most of their "proper" scripting in C/C++ directly. (With some statistical anomalies allegedly doing things like bolting in Lua interpreters.)
But yeah, outside of indies and small game companies my impression is that C/C++ is still king and there's some consternation that developers learning from the indie side are sometimes, if interviewing for AAA teams, getting shuttled to "tools" positions because that's where AAA's only C# code lives (in non-critical tools outside of the games). (Though that's mostly anecdata from reading similar gamedev forums.)