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I'll say this because it needs to be said. Recently it seems like every developer on LinkedIn who has "C++" in their profile, and their cat, is spammed every co

I'll say this because it needs to be said. Recently it seems like every developer on LinkedIn who has "C++" in their profile, and their cat, is spammed every couple of weeks by some recruiter with a "great opportunity, 130,000 euros FULLY REMOTE", turning out eventually to be recruiting for think-cell. I got it, my friends got it, my work mates got it, everyone gets spammed periodically, it has become the laughingstock of job ads. Why? Read the Glassdoor reviews. The CTO is a terrorist obsessed with complexity, they overengineered themselves into a corner by using every freaking C++ feature that ever existed, making sure that there's only 3 or 4 people in this world who can understand their code. Of course the usual pattern goes: guy learns #feature on-the-fly appearing both incredibly smart and embelishing his resume, until of course reality hits and the complexity of the crap he wrote outclasses his "genius" intellectual capacity so then he leaves, leaving the mess for future hires to deal with. Consequently there's maybe 3 people left in this world capable to understand the atrocity that's running there, not saying fix it. So good luck finding them. These people, if they exist, already work for more that $130k. Also, why do they need the absolute raging brinking edge of C++ features? What does this company do? Trillion dollar ultra low latency / high throughput high frequency trading? AAA+ games running on 4 x 4k monitors at 200+ fps? No. They do some farty charts. Again. Good luck with the recruitment! :)

lbhdc 2y ago
That kind of sounds like a lot of code bases I have worked in. Once you get some many people on a project things can get messy. Perhaps its a sign they have some DX and tech debt they should address. As for why the latest version of c++? Personally I have found the dx improvements of some of them to be worth the upgrade. I really like constexpr and the build time errors it gives (opposed to runtime). The newer standards let you use constexpr in more places with more stl types.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
It does make "C with classes" sound pretty appealing. Well, maybe also with some very limited template facilities. Shoot... Did I just describe Ada95 somewhat?
pixelpoet 2y ago
As a C++ dev in Germany, experienced this firsthand. They make you do some truly ridiculous tests, and in the end 130k isn't that far off from somewhere like Maxon where you actually do interesting work. Having spoken to others who applied, both in person and via easily found reddit thread on r/cpp, 100% certain I would have been absolutely miserable there, and everyone mentions the CTO.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >100% certain I would have been absolutely miserable there, and everyone mentions the CTO But..but.. think-cell says that: "Our CTO Arno maintains a close working relationship with all of our developers. Together, they review code, troubleshoot, and brainstorm. Most likely due to Arno's and Markus' academic roots, think-cell is flourishing without program managers and lengthy meetings." Those are all the traits of a good manager and pleasant work environment. And you get to work in Berlin!
  - intelVISA 2y ago
    > flourishing without program managers and lengthy meetings €130k for a good C++ dev is a steal in most markets, but I can see this 'perk' as a huge draw for people tired of shops where "bringing key stakeholders into conversations at the appropriate time" is valued over simply building product.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >€130k for a good C++ dev is a steal in most markets, In most markets? Definitely not.
    - chipdart 2y ago
      > €130k for a good C++ dev is a steal in most markets (...) To reign you back to reality, in Europe not even FANGs pay that kind of salaries. They only pay that kind of cash to senior and staff-level engineers.
      - 2y ago
f1shy 2y ago
This is the description of at least 50% of the C++ projects where I was involved with. Only missing the language lawyers citing paragraphs of the standard at least once a meeting.
- Scubabear68 2y ago
  Oh how I miss the language lawyers in C++. Some really elevated it to a high calling. </s>
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    They got obsoleted by clang-tidy.
    - chipdart 2y ago
      The power of linters to reign in the bike shedding and pointless nitpicking in pull requests should be mentioned more often. I recall that once I had the misfortune to have a junior developer in a team who was highly ambitious but low-skilled , and their way to claim high standards and attention to detail was to fill everyone's PRs with remarks bickering over whitespaces while citing his personal style guide that the guy was keeping in a personal Google Docs document. That nonsense stopped the very moment I onboarded clang-format, but the guy unexplainably refused to run the tool on personal PRs. Insane.
nuancebydefault 2y ago
Finally somebody on HN getting attention for mentioning this sad truth. Usually even the least criticism on this 'holy' language [that emphasizes 'intent' and glorifies people who truly understand 'const correctness!' and the correct usage of dynamic_cast] gets immediately downvoted. The sad truth being, tons of impossible to understand code bases exist in the wild, due to, for example, the mix of old, less old and new memory handling strategies having been applied.
SassyBird 2y ago
Same. I and a couple of my colleagues got offers. Regarding love of complexity and C++, they’re sitting on the C++ committee. Complexity is their bread and butter. :) I also kinda doubt “Trillion dollar ultra low latency / high throughput high frequency trading/AAA+ games running on 4 x 4k monitors at 200+ fps” people are such enthusiasts of the bleeding-edge of C++. The standard library and the style of programming popular in the committee isn’t very concerned with high performance it seems.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > Regarding love of complexity and C++, they’re sitting on the C++ committee. Complexity is their bread and butter. :) To me the think-cell guys sound like they are gung-ho on clout-chasing, to the point that this side of theirs even eclipses their own products and services. It sounds they got the whole point of software engineering entirely backwards: their goal is to pile complex tech showcases in their product line and presentations as a proxy to being competent in their field,and instead they unwittingly put together unmaintainable and convoluted code that requires a high cognitive load just to troubleshoot the simplest issues.
- AnonSixOneTh 2y ago
  >> Regarding love of complexity and C++, they’re sitting on the C++ committee. Complexity is their bread and butter. :) Wow, I didn't know that, it explains a lot. There was a post on HN a while ago titled '“Modern” C++ Lamentations' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898955). My eyes bleed when I see that "N Pythagorean triples" program in "C++". That's as close to classic C++ as Chinese is to Latin. And it's barely 10+ years since 2011. At this rate I don't even dare think what the "Modernest C++" of 2034 will look like, given the incentives the committee guys run on. If programming was done with pen and paper, I'd bet on making us stick a pen in our ass and write with that. Either way I'm expecting some equivalent proctology intervention needed to comply with the standard 10 years from now.
  - foonathan 2y ago
    Post author here. To be fair, we specifically don't use std::ranges because of that "N Pythagorean triple" problem. We have our own custom library that is vastly superior to std::ranges. See e.g. here for context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ntC-Y1syY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ntC-Y1syY I was recently appointed co-chair for the std::ranges group and I'm trying to bring some of the improvements to C++.
nxobject 2y ago
Truly, it's far from reassuring that the rest of think-cell's developer blog is more about "modern C++" debates on style and pitfalls ("Should we stop declaring functions and use global constexpr lambdas instead? Consider argument-dependent lookup...") than about developing their product.
- foonathan 2y ago
  Oh, that's just a side effect of the way the work is distributed :D I'm hired to maintain our core libraries and general C++ stuff, and I write most of the blog articles, so it's about the problems I face in my everday work. We should blog more about the other stuff. For example, we've implemented a pretty cool lossless compression scheme for the preview of powerpoint slides in search, and have acquiried a cool technology to search for existing slides by drawing a sketch of their layout. But the people working on that are too busy to blog about them...
ano-ther 2y ago
The yelling CTO and the Glassdor reviews are certainly a red flag for potential employees. But the company itself is interesting. They built an add-on for PowerPoint for which they charge more than MS charges for the entire Office Suite (my company pays around €130 per year and user). With a million users served by approximately 20 devs they are very profitable, which they highlight in their job ads. As a small company with a relatively boring product, they need to do something to attract new people. And they can afford to approach every c++ programmer individually, support community efforts (standards committee) and sending people to Aspen for a conference. They might be a little clumsy so their recruiting comes across as spam. As for latest c++ features not being appropriate: as a user, I don’t care as long as the product works as intended, which it has been doing for me since over 10 years now.

lbhdc 2y ago

That kind of sounds like a lot of code bases I have worked in. Once you get some many people on a project things can get messy. Perhaps its a sign they have some DX and tech debt they should address. As for why the latest version of c++? Personally I have found the dx improvements of some of them to be worth the upgrade. I really like constexpr and the build time errors it gives (opposed to runtime). The newer standards let you use constexpr in more places with more stl types.

CoastalCoder 2y ago

It does make "C with classes" sound pretty appealing. Well, maybe also with some very limited template facilities. Shoot... Did I just describe Ada95 somewhat?

pixelpoet 2y ago

As a C++ dev in Germany, experienced this firsthand. They make you do some truly ridiculous tests, and in the end 130k isn't that far off from somewhere like Maxon where you actually do interesting work. Having spoken to others who applied, both in person and via easily found reddit thread on r/cpp, 100% certain I would have been absolutely miserable there, and everyone mentions the CTO.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>100% certain I would have been absolutely miserable there, and everyone mentions the CTO But..but.. think-cell says that: "Our CTO Arno maintains a close working relationship with all of our developers. Together, they review code, troubleshoot, and brainstorm. Most likely due to Arno's and Markus' academic roots, think-cell is flourishing without program managers and lengthy meetings." Those are all the traits of a good manager and pleasant work environment. And you get to work in Berlin!
- intelVISA 2y ago
  > flourishing without program managers and lengthy meetings €130k for a good C++ dev is a steal in most markets, but I can see this 'perk' as a huge draw for people tired of shops where "bringing key stakeholders into conversations at the appropriate time" is valued over simply building product.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >€130k for a good C++ dev is a steal in most markets, In most markets? Definitely not.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > €130k for a good C++ dev is a steal in most markets (...) To reign you back to reality, in Europe not even FANGs pay that kind of salaries. They only pay that kind of cash to senior and staff-level engineers.
    - 2y ago

f1shy 2y ago

This is the description of at least 50% of the C++ projects where I was involved with. Only missing the language lawyers citing paragraphs of the standard at least once a meeting.

Scubabear68 2y ago
Oh how I miss the language lawyers in C++. Some really elevated it to a high calling. </s>
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  They got obsoleted by clang-tidy.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    The power of linters to reign in the bike shedding and pointless nitpicking in pull requests should be mentioned more often. I recall that once I had the misfortune to have a junior developer in a team who was highly ambitious but low-skilled , and their way to claim high standards and attention to detail was to fill everyone's PRs with remarks bickering over whitespaces while citing his personal style guide that the guy was keeping in a personal Google Docs document. That nonsense stopped the very moment I onboarded clang-format, but the guy unexplainably refused to run the tool on personal PRs. Insane.

nuancebydefault 2y ago

Finally somebody on HN getting attention for mentioning this sad truth. Usually even the least criticism on this 'holy' language [that emphasizes 'intent' and glorifies people who truly understand 'const correctness!' and the correct usage of dynamic_cast] gets immediately downvoted. The sad truth being, tons of impossible to understand code bases exist in the wild, due to, for example, the mix of old, less old and new memory handling strategies having been applied.

SassyBird 2y ago

Same. I and a couple of my colleagues got offers. Regarding love of complexity and C++, they’re sitting on the C++ committee. Complexity is their bread and butter. :) I also kinda doubt “Trillion dollar ultra low latency / high throughput high frequency trading/AAA+ games running on 4 x 4k monitors at 200+ fps” people are such enthusiasts of the bleeding-edge of C++. The standard library and the style of programming popular in the committee isn’t very concerned with high performance it seems.

chipdart 2y ago
> Regarding love of complexity and C++, they’re sitting on the C++ committee. Complexity is their bread and butter. :) To me the think-cell guys sound like they are gung-ho on clout-chasing, to the point that this side of theirs even eclipses their own products and services. It sounds they got the whole point of software engineering entirely backwards: their goal is to pile complex tech showcases in their product line and presentations as a proxy to being competent in their field,and instead they unwittingly put together unmaintainable and convoluted code that requires a high cognitive load just to troubleshoot the simplest issues.
AnonSixOneTh 2y ago
>> Regarding love of complexity and C++, they’re sitting on the C++ committee. Complexity is their bread and butter. :) Wow, I didn't know that, it explains a lot. There was a post on HN a while ago titled '“Modern” C++ Lamentations' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898955). My eyes bleed when I see that "N Pythagorean triples" program in "C++". That's as close to classic C++ as Chinese is to Latin. And it's barely 10+ years since 2011. At this rate I don't even dare think what the "Modernest C++" of 2034 will look like, given the incentives the committee guys run on. If programming was done with pen and paper, I'd bet on making us stick a pen in our ass and write with that. Either way I'm expecting some equivalent proctology intervention needed to comply with the standard 10 years from now.
- foonathan 2y ago
  Post author here. To be fair, we specifically don't use std::ranges because of that "N Pythagorean triple" problem. We have our own custom library that is vastly superior to std::ranges. See e.g. here for context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ntC-Y1syY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ntC-Y1syY I was recently appointed co-chair for the std::ranges group and I'm trying to bring some of the improvements to C++.

nxobject 2y ago

Truly, it's far from reassuring that the rest of think-cell's developer blog is more about "modern C++" debates on style and pitfalls ("Should we stop declaring functions and use global constexpr lambdas instead? Consider argument-dependent lookup...") than about developing their product.

foonathan 2y ago
Oh, that's just a side effect of the way the work is distributed :D I'm hired to maintain our core libraries and general C++ stuff, and I write most of the blog articles, so it's about the problems I face in my everday work. We should blog more about the other stuff. For example, we've implemented a pretty cool lossless compression scheme for the preview of powerpoint slides in search, and have acquiried a cool technology to search for existing slides by drawing a sketch of their layout. But the people working on that are too busy to blog about them...

ano-ther 2y ago

The yelling CTO and the Glassdor reviews are certainly a red flag for potential employees. But the company itself is interesting. They built an add-on for PowerPoint for which they charge more than MS charges for the entire Office Suite (my company pays around €130 per year and user). With a million users served by approximately 20 devs they are very profitable, which they highlight in their job ads. As a small company with a relatively boring product, they need to do something to attract new people. And they can afford to approach every c++ programmer individually, support community efforts (standards committee) and sending people to Aspen for a conference. They might be a little clumsy so their recruiting comes across as spam. As for latest c++ features not being appropriate: as a user, I don’t care as long as the product works as intended, which it has been doing for me since over 10 years now.