Having worked close to a few highly skilled C/C++ developers (the author of HAProxy, core Firefox developers, people who write highly sensitive crypto code, ...), it is amusing to see them constantly doubt their knowledge of the language they master so well.

A decade and a half ago, one of my professor once told me: "You don't learn to master Linux, you learn to accept that you can't master it." Same point, different context.

Their perpetual self-doubt is probably a component of their mastery. If they assumed they were right after a point they would stop learning.

It's not so much doubt, but knowing enough to know there is so much you will not ever know without looking something up. C++ is a large language with a lot of dark corners. People who use it day in and day out know these dark corners exist. Even more so if they are working on a code base that many people have touched over many years.

Anyone who gives themselves a combined C/C++ rating has't spent enough time with either language. :)

I work as a full time C++ developer and the stuff in this article is just arcane magic to me. I feel like there's a level far above what anyone normally works with, and I'm an engine programmer for game dev, so it's pretty close to the metal already.

Kind of like interviewing at Google: "oh, you're a 9 in C++? let me introduce you to your interviewers for the day: Hans Boehm, Chandler Carruth, Richard Smith, and Jeffrey Yasskin. We were lucky to get them; they're off to the ISO C++ standards committee meeting tomorrow"

This would be a moronic interviewing technique, but it would also be unsurprising for Google.

I used to know some people on that committee back in the 90s.

That they knew far from the whole language taught me much about the world and my place in it.

Those guys are like Congressmen - that's a different gig form being a beat cop.

Modulo C++, if you are in the right chair, I figure making a solid six takes less than a year and that's enough to do some heavy lifting. But it's hard to find a job where you'll get the right stimulus.

I'd back off on "compiler developer" - that's severely different from "compiler exploiter."

The way to avid all the ugly in the language is to have good habits. You only use the parts that work well. When I see things like Heartbleed, I think "poor guy never debugged a comms protocol in the wild in his life." That's one of those thing that's like combat - you have to defend a real product in the wild for a span of time before you "get it."

I think elite developers rate themselves 1-10 depending on which part of language are they using and pushing forward. And Scala brought this to the world of Java as well, no chance for a single person to understand it completely.

Or perhaps they are simply using a different scale than you are. It's not like there's an objective meaning to attach to each number.