programming is a blue collar job, no degree required. Try climbing the ladder in a technical company (not a startup). You won't have the skills and understanding to assume the responsibilities of higher positions.
It's been this way for a long time. Programming can be taught at a vo-tech.
Reddit has something like 3m active accounts and 150m unique visitors in a typical month. The Blackout2015 sub has 37k subscribers. Make no mistake: this and the fatpeoplehate protest are an absolute drop in the bucket in terms of Reddit's overall user base. It's only notable for how easy it is for a relatively small group to completely control the narrative on /r/all.
These people are trying to organize a blackout for July 10th-12th. I hope they do. You know what will happen? Reddit will return to normal. For two days no one will talk about Pao or Victoria and they'll realize literally no one cares about their protest.
I think CMake is one of the best (not saying it's perfect) C/C++ build systems I've used (used jam, make, automake, qmake, scons quite comprehensively, either via choice or under duress), and there are some things that are close to impossible (or were a few years ago).
One of these was getting an executable that's built as part of a script to generate a .cpp which is then built as another lib as a further dependency within the same build - I believe that's possible now as OpenEXR does it. Similarly, I've had to run external programs that binary patch executables and had serious issues doing that.
That isn't all that hard to do, CMake routinely supports this for e.g. Swig or Qt's moc/uic/rcc tools. The code generator creates a bunch of files and those can be either built as a library or added to your normal list of sources.
This is the worse advice I have ever seen.
This kind of 'doctoring' ends up with "take this pill, if it doesn't work come back'. (lets change that for loop to start with 1 instead of 0. problem still there ? hmm could be that equation is wrong...)
How about this ?
Take an X-Ray. See what is broken. Cut into the body, see what is broken.
Same with software. The 'symptoms' are very diffuse and do not map 1 to 1 with the 'disease'.
Use the debugger. Capture outputs at intermediate steps and evaluate them. Dig into the system to identify the actual problem, then fix that.
I can run Fortran IV code on a modern compiler without change.
2015-1966=48 years. And counting.
Ada95 was a very easy transition from Ada83.
Pay attention to users ! Backwards compatibility is MANDATORY for a language.
Give me aggressive transition with breaking changes (and a major version), but the one that genuinely improves the language over attempts to maintain compatibility that lead to a stagnant language any day.
You greatly overvalue the specifics of your CS courses. The concepts, at a high level of abstraction, should be identifiable to you from memory. The details are recovered by using some ancient technology known as a book.
