Comment by hliyan

For ten years, I worked on codebases written in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL -- we needed faster, thread safe versions of strings and maps which were not available at the time; Boost? What's that?), its own custom messaging middleware built directly on sockets, its on distributed process management system built with unix syscalls (obviously). There was not a single line of HTML, Java etc. anywhere. It was a comfortable, high-paid life and I solved cutting edge problems (HFT, distributed, concurrent computing). In 2013, I forced myself to quit, start with a small company that paid me half the salary so that I could learn the web tech stack from the ground up. It was all to avoid this fate. I'd like to think I've succeeded.