Finally...Someone speaks the truth.

Wow, I had forgotten the pain of "I have to upgrade my computer every two years issue", I use to have. I switched to OSX, WSL, and ubuntu years ago and since they I only had to upgrade about once ever 8 years or so. When I need windows I just run parallels. Say what you want about Apple, their hardware even when running windows lasts.

As in most questions of this type it depends on what you need to do. Unreal is easy to get started but quickly becomes complicated unless you have a background in programming games, ideally writing your own engine, or using another engine like Unity, Godot, Lumberyard, or one of the others. Plan to spend a lot of time learning the API layer. While Unreal gives you lots of systems and excellent search capabilities you do need to know what you are looking for and what the different components do. Plan to spend a significant amount of time learning Blueprint (Unreal's visual programming language). If you are staring with an existing code base, you might be able to start being productive in as little as a month of concentrated effort. If they expect you to be the 'sole' developer and you don't have any other experience then you might want to consider your options or make it very clear to your employer that you will need significant ramp up time.

Actually, Microsoft really would like to fix these issues. They have a serious problem though, some of it is poly driven some is the reality of the situation they are in. They can't change things too radically as that will potentially break millions of business apps. I know, an icon or its location should be 'no big deal', but as soon as you do, Ford motor company calls up, and the Visual Basic app we have been using forever no longer works. So any visual or organizational change potentially costs Microsoft money, which is considered a cost that reduces your profit numbers. I know silly right? So the bar for changing anything is very high. Interestingly, the bar for 'adding new features' is shallow. In fact, their quarterly review process encourages new features to be added. Want a promotion, pay raise then create new features. Oh and make sure to patent anything you think of. Is it fixable? In theory yes, but it would have to be driven from the top by the CEO. When Bill ran the company he would allow internal competition every so often. A group would be created to be a competitor to an internal product, eventually, one of the groups would be shut down and the technology that worked best would become the new product line. This approach has worked in the past and resulted in the creation of NT, Windows 2000, XP, and so on.

I have used Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code, for years on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Both tools work better than Xcode, in my opinion. A while ago I got frustrated with Visual Studio for Mac and in a moment of insanity decided to give JetBrains Rider a try. I know crazy. Within an hour Rider had made me a convert. It works the same everywhere and has improved productivity. Its IntelliSense is so detailed that I rarely have to do google searches for technical questions. It has a column selection ability that lets you select a column in lines of code, type, and change something then jump to the end and add the end code symbols. For example, change a block of constants from values to strings or a block of defines to case value: in like 3 keystrokes! No, the code does not have to be column aligned for it to work! Rider is not free but it helped me enough that the yearly fee is something I don't mind paying at all.

It depends on what type of job you are trying to find. If it is in the database software development world you might want to look at no SQL databases like Mongo DB. If you are looking for a position as a game programmer you might want to take a look at Unity which will allow you to leverage and improve your C# skills. For embedded programming, you would want to look at the Internet of Things (IoT) and C. Having specific skills and languages on your resume may get you through the HR review, but getting an offer and succeeding at the new job comes down to your ability to: 1 - Understand and solve problems. 2 - Learn and effectively leverage new technologies. 3 - Communicate clearly. For example, if you are a core game software developer, I would expect to see the applications and systems you created, worked on, and how you addressed and solved some of the challenges you faced. Having Unreal/C/C++ on your resume tells me very little; but saying that you updated the unreal memory manager to address the unique needs of Gears of War, tells me a lot about your ability to read code you did not write, and effectively change it to fit the needs of a major game franchise. Naturally in the interview, I would dig into this area to discover just what you did and how you solved those issues.

A great manager uses metrics to highlight the great work his/her team is doing, a poor manager uses metrics like a slave master to try and protect his/her position.

That is the absolute truth. Considering how much code costs to develop, you would think more managers would force code documentation standards of some kind. I have not found that to be the case. I had one job where they actually asked that all comments be removed, thinking that this would 'speed' up building the system. Of course, after doing all this work to remove all the comments we discovered that the compiler is very efficient at ignoring them. Who would have thought? Wow?

I learned the lesson of good documentation early in my career when I wrote a quick and dirty assembly tool thinking I would only use this once and throw it away. Long story short, 6 weeks later I need to change something and ended up having to spend time reverse engineering my own code. Since that time I have always documented my programming. Sadly, I can only recount 2 other projects I have done in 35 years that documented anything.

Start by determining what data it works with. Then split out the functions and start figuring out the inputs and outputs from each function. Finally, make a process and data flow diagrams for the code. This process makes short work of understanding even the most cryptic code. If you don't want to spend a day or two doing this process there are tools like sourcetrail that will do the work for you.

Oh, come on you know you love to program in COW

*clapping* Finally, another dev gets it! If you are not going to take care of the exception then don't catch it. And by taking care of the exception, I don't mean to log it and forget it. Actually, do something about it.

My first developer job at Microsoft required me to analyze code written by a 'developer who got promoted so is no longer available. I and another dev spent hours analyzing this C language mess. Finally, after hours of analysis, we traced deep enough to get to the root of what the code was doing. Result? It returned the number 1. Yup, that is all the entire 20K lines of code did. The reason it never worked? The array this was used to dereference only had 1 element. Sheesh.

Not a book but it's free... W3 schools C++ Tutorial[^] takes you though the basics and lets you interactively try things out.

I actually got in trouble with my boss once for that...Quote, "Your code is too easy to understand. This is not good as management won't need you later to fix it". I left that job about 6 months later and got a better one. :D

Of course, there is the other school of thought I don't subscribe to personally. If the code was hard to write it should be extremely difficult to modify, and impossible change". From time to time get to work with SDEs that think this is the way code should be.

Comments are necessary for one simple reason, "I don't know what you are thinking when you wrote or changed this code". Documentation is removed from the code does not live with the code and can and will be lost. I don't know how many times I have heard, "We don't know what happened to the docs". Still don't think comments are needed? Ok then try this exercise. Write some code to solve a problem you have today. Ok now put the code away and don't look at it for 6 weeks. In 6 weeks go back to the code and make a change, fix a bug do something to it. Time how long it takes you to 'remember' how the code works and what you need to do to make the fix. Still not convinced? Perform the same process, but this time put comment headers in explaining what you were thinking when you wrote the code. Put the code away for 6 weeks and then perform the same test again only this time with the comments. Don't have time for all this process? What to jump to the result? In the first case, it will take you a fair amount of time reading and trying to remember what you were trying to do and how something worked. In the second case, you will find that you can make the update and or fix it in less than a few minutes. Now put yourself in someone else's shoes. If you went through this with your code and you wrote that code imagine how the next developer to pick up your code will feel? Ever wonder why the next devs end up throwing out, refactoring, or reworking lots of code? Guess what it's not as self-documenting as you want to think. I learned this lesson back in the assembler days. I wrote a one-off tool to solve the problem I had at the time. A week later (yes only 1 week) I needed the code again to solve the same problem, but it did not work on this 'slightly' different set of data. No problem I thought, I'll just fix the bug. Two hours later I was finally starting to understand how the tool was supposed to work and where the problems were. That was the last time I ever wrote code that did not have comments.

it's cute and as someone who has written programming languages and multiple compilers in my career, I have to give kudos to its attempt to do something about error processing which is pretty much overlooked by everyone because...well... it's hard.

I miss the days when all code was C. To quote the master: “Moira nodded vigorously. She didn't know what BASIC or COBOL were, except that Wiz said they caused brain damage in those who used them.” ― Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

Unity used to have boo a python scripting language. No one used it though as Unity also had C#. Me personally I prefer C#.