[dagenix]

I find reading medical "standards" papers onerous and feel like they're written in a way that's deliberately inaccessible. I don't much like the idea of going to Medical Conferences -- even if my company funded it, which maybe they would, I feel like I'd be marginalized for not knowing basic medical techniques, not knowing the new hotness by heart, and generally being a proponent of bleeding with leeches. I just feel like so much of the Medical "standards" work feels like it's led by academics who think the concerns of people that don't know medicine like me are beneath them.

Is there a way I can "get involved" and does my voice have any value?

[arandr0x]

You're being flippant, but your paragraph is the reason we have pharmaceutical sales reps, and the reason they are so well paid.

[jplayer01]

Except the information to inform himself is everywhere. All the CppCon talks are on YouTube. There are tons of great resources for learning modern C++, or learning about what's going on in the C++ world - there are plenty of teachers, among them even Stroustrup. If he isn't interested in putting in anything more than zero effort into defeating his own ignorance, why should anybody else care about him?

[arandr0x]

I've since taken the advice on the other threads and watched more CppCon talks -- I think my problem is I used to google new features and find talks on them, and they were features that were too advanced for my understanding, and that made me think every talk was like that. I've watched a few talks now that are both exactly relevant to what I do and completely understandable. So, I'm glad that in this specific case ranting on the Internet had the effect that I got new motivation to try harder to find talks that were for me. I don't comment on any other website than here and now I know why. I have never had in person a conversation with anybody about C++ that has taught me more than an evening of these talks. I still don't feel I'm ever going to be able to do anything about when C++ is frustrating to my workflow, but at least I have more tools to sidestep the frustrating parts. I wanted to give an update so people would know that the advice was actually really good, and that the talks even though they're hour long, are very dense in information.

That said, you (and several of the other posters) are being awfully dismissive of the notion that there are people who work in your language but don't feel confident with it. I may have major imposter syndrome or something but I've (before this weekend) thought if I didn't get a talk at first it meant I was too stupid for all talks. I don't have mentors at my company because most senior developers have other subjects of expertise than C++, which is just a tool to us. My city has several Javascript meetups but nothing on C++. And I think the way I've been treated when saying, essentially, relative to the C++ community, "I use C++ every single day but I don't think I'm one of them", which is being told, "you're not good enough/disciplined enough/confident enough to be one of us", shows that.

Most of programming is slowly waking up to the idea that being exclusive and giving people tough love instead of guidance is starving companies out of potentially good developers. I know my coworkers and most of them would give up on a learning resource that they felt was too advanced and would be turned off from any effort if all everyone was telling then was "try harder". (Even though in this case trying harder is 100% the solution.)

In most other fields, including medicine, there are high-EQ people hired to fix exactly that, by bridging the gap between where the practitioners currently are, and where the industry wants them to be, usually in a way that's either very high touch or very structured. And in those other fields, if most practitioners aren't reached by the information, or are consistently misapplying it, the industry guilds put the blame on the way their information is being transmitted, not on the practitioners.