[Pelayu]

From my personal experience it seems that companies looking for C++ devs are far too picky. I have a few years professional experience in C for embedded systems and have written personal projects in C++ but have been rejected from every C++ position I applied for. It seems that companies only want someone with 5+ years experience and are unwilling to take less experienced people on.

[GoToRO]

Putting 5 years of C++ in your last position on your resume will fix it. HR people have no clue about programming and they don't want to risk recommending somebody who is not a perfect fit. So you take that responsability on yourself. The time when qualified people did the hiring is long gone.

[dataflow]

I'm guessing it might be because the years of embedded C experience (even if it's decades) don't necessarily show you're able to put aside what you learned and learn what's a wildly different language that happens to have some superficial similarities. In some respects it might be even harder to get someone with too many years in C to start writing C++-style code (or vice-versa!), given how difficult both languages are and how entrenched people are in each one. If you can show off any of your C++ code to any of the engineers interviewing you, I suspect it may go a long way—that is, assuming your C++ code looks like modern C++, and doesn't look like it used to be C code.

[captaincrowbar]

Yeah, this. One of C++’s biggest problems has always been the number of people who have spent years writing C and think that qualifies them to write C++.

[Pelayu]

This attitude is one of the main reasons of the C++ shortage though. You are dismissing anyone else's potential to learn and become a C++ developer. I didn't say that I'm a qualified C++ dev, just that I wanted to start learning to be one and get a foot in the door.

[rightbyte]

C'mon. In practice the differences are hugely overblown. The fundamentals are about the same.

Also doing "modern" Cpp with dogmatically ugly static and reinterpret_cast and shared or unique_ptr:s everywhere is just annoying.

"Best practices" in SWE are usually antipatterns since they are Cargo culted in a dogmatic way.

But then again I am a embedded C programmer ...

[dataflow]

> C'mon. In practice the differences are hugely overblown. The fundamentals are about the same.

> Also doing "modern" Cpp [...] is just annoying.

You're basically saying "I can totally do what you're asking, but I actually think it's super annoying and I'd very much rather do things my own way, so you should hire me because I'm an excellent candidate." Do you expect this to be a good sell?

[rightbyte]

I am not trying to sell in myself as a Cpp programmer at some corp. If that were the case, I would sing praise to smart pointers and Agile processes, like everyone else.

I am not dogmatically against 'modern' Cpp. It should just be used with self control. And many people way overdo it.