Question: what kind of skills do financial companies typically look for from C++ devs?
Whenever I hear “C++ expert”, I don’t know what that means. Are they masters of the STL? Are they part of the “C with classes” church? Are they an unhinged template meta programmer? Are they a major gcc/clang contributor? Did they co-author a part of the language spec?
Or are they just some dude with 7 years of experience working on a single C++ codebase and the subset of features that happens to be using?
More specifically in trading, the most important thing seems to be to know how to write fast code, while keeping the codebase maintainable, because it's going to keep growing, and will need to change as the world changes.
That means avoiding polymorphism (and so a fair chunk of OO design), making heavy use of templates, and understanding the performance characteristics of language constructs and standard library functions. Expect to be slinging godbolts back and forth, benchmarking obscure hashmap implementations, and occasionally sweating over the precise layout of structs to maximise their cache-friendliness.
Whenever I hear “C++ expert”, I don’t know what that means. Are they masters of the STL? Are they part of the “C with classes” church? Are they an unhinged template meta programmer? Are they a major gcc/clang contributor? Did they co-author a part of the language spec?
Or are they just some dude with 7 years of experience working on a single C++ codebase and the subset of features that happens to be using?