Last time I looked at the finance industry, which was admittedly a while ago, I saw a C++ job that …

Last time I looked at the finance industry, which was admittedly a while ago, I saw a C++ job that listed the salary as being around $100k. Sounds reasonable. In New York City. Oh . Compare to Google salaries, on levels.fyi for example. I know they're not theoretical or inaccurate because I worked at Google for a while. If you really want to do C++ professionally, that and maybe other FAANG companies seem like they'd give you much higher quality of life. But the truth is, if you're a C++ developer, you may as well just take up another programming language and get paid more. The data doesn't lie: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-... C++ was basically the first programming language I really learned, but I seldom use it in the industry, because I don't know why I would intentionally pick a pay cut to do harder work. (I consider C++ to be "harder" than many of the languages above it in pay grade even when doing the same work, for most tasks.)