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

I use C++ and do it badly for my own satisfaction, for personsl projects, beholden to no one. I don't bother with the arcana of the language and just crank out what works. I wouldn't use it for production systems. I enjoy using C++ and don't tell employers I know it or use it. Fun laid-back coding is good for my mental health.

I did C and C++ in the uni but nobody gave me the chance of actually prove it to hiring people. I find breaking into the C++ world too hard and people don't take that many chances.

I can't say I am the ultra knowledgeable about everything there is in C++, but I feel like there is quite a barrier entering this field. Nowadays, I do wonder if it's even worth it.

C++ is a runtime performance language, usually used for simulations - the most notable type of realtime simulation being computer and console games.

If you avoid C++, you can never have a career as a significant engineer in this field, in particular -- at best you'll be consigned to writing tools and web services.

Outside of realtime performance programming, avoiding C++ is fine -- although it's nowhere near as scary as it's detractors suggest. Almost every other language commonly used by computer scientists derived from it.

I did a lot of C++ during my undergraduate degree (including a taught course unit, which was rare in those days and even less common to see today) and then a lot during my PhD. The first two years of work I pretty much exclusively worked with C++. I was using the language for 10 years and I now realize that the time could have been spent better elsewhere. I wouldn't say it was a total waste of time - C++ forces you to learn a lot about how computers work at a low level, and this is useful and transferable experience. However, given the same amount of time, it is absolutly true that I could have learned a much broader range of technologies. This might have been multiple languages, or potentially even a frontend framework, which would have allowed me to market myself as a full stack developer. My point being, if I had a much more diverse technology stack background, then I would be much more employable. Fortunately, I took a role where I worked exclusively with Rust for about a year. From this experience, I realized how long it takes to write C++ code, and on the other hand, how much faster I could have been writing software during the last 10 years if I had been working with a language which would have enabled me to be more productive with less lines of code and less characters typed. When I left the firm where I was last writing C++ code, I was considered to be one of the top developers there, but the firm was not a HFT. I interviewed with quite a few HFTs, but never became enthusiastic about the domain. I got the impression that most HFT work is just performing weird hacks in code to try and make the software run faster. I can't imagine this is a lot of fun. You write a worse code from a design or asthetic point of view, make it highly obfuscated and hard to understand, but the end result is it runs a bit faster? That sounds really, really arduous. I've decided my career went in the wrong direction and since then I've been doing as much as I possibly can to learn a more broad range of technologies, including frontend frameworks, other languages and other technologies such as Kafka. I feel like I wasted too much time doing C++, and became too focused on low level technical details rather than solving business problems quickly. The intricacies of C++ absorb a lot of engineering time and the end result is the time to market becomes very long. I'm glad I realized this early in my career so I can take a different path. Sorry C++ - I used to be obsessed with learning this language but now I realize it was just a distraction.