This, IMO, is the single hardest question that a software engineer will face in his career. The choice is hard and the situation is really confusing, because different shops attach a different meaning to the manager title. Sometimes these are just leads that get promoted and they still own their respective projects. Sometimes they are just projects managers. Yet sometimes the whole thing is blurred into madness by insanely tall hierarchies and inapt managers who want to micromanage their staff.

My advice is to sample the lead role and then learn what the manager really means in your company.

I do think you should be able to list all major STL container classes when interviewing for a C++ programming position. This is akin to being able to read, as you would not even know what to search for otherwise.

I then ask candidates about the data structures the containers represent: memory layout and consumption, optimal usage, etc. Note, this is not about having to remember N overloads of the insert() member function, but rather about knowing what the container does and how to use it optimally.

So, should I stop feeling blue?..

First of all, why did you even pick up classes? Isn't the compiler's aide to implement inheritance and virtual functions to complex? Is life too short to learn the syntax? Or would you rather roll your own with function pointers?

Now, having let out some steam, any subset of C++ is a reasonable dialect in its own right. Many people who put C++ on their resume just write C-style procedural code and that is ok. Then people reach into OO things like abstract classes. Then there are standard containers. And then people start writing their own code in that style and we are off to the generic programming domain.

All these are fine tools and it is just an engineering discussion to choose the one that is the most appropriate for the task. The education (aka "C++ style") is important here as things that novice users discover or stumble over have underlining reasons, alternatives and counter parts.

Finally, my personal experience with matter is unambiguous - professionally written high level C++ code is easier to maintain, has fewer bugs and is simply less verbose and more to the point then procedural, lower level C-style code. The only gotcha here is education.

Some links, please!

OK, so would femdom be OK? Affirmative action and all?..

That is part of the point, but that is not the whole truth. You see, GMail is not a product in itself in the traditional sense of the word. GMail is a free service yet you are a product that is being sold to advertisers. The service is there just to get eyeballs and its features are developed just to keep eyeballs coming back... what was that line about "...to bring them all and in the darkness bind them"?..

Because that is the price of the seemingly "free" GMail service. People can discuss ad blockers, but that is really besides the point. The point is that GMail is not the only way to handle email. I don't use GMail and, hence, don't see ads. But, running Postfix is not for everyone...

The current project is mainly C#, so I've need to be able to type brackets, semicolons and parentheses quick and painlessly."

You are looking at adverbs here, so repeat after me:

"Typing how?"

Quickly. Painlessly.

Sure, the service is undeniably convenient. But what will you do if they choose to delete your account due to some recently announced policy change? Also, on a more general note, how do you feel about Google indexing all your correspondence including banking, medical, trade and other very personal data?

So, do we have any good links?

I am a C++ dev. As such, I highly value my convenience and productivity and my choice of IDE is Visual Studio. Most of my code runs on Linux yet I choose to write/build/debug on VisualStudio. Why? Because of IntelliSense/VisualAssistX, good compiler and integrated debugger.

That is why I am still on Windows.

Well, I doubt they would ever port the massive codebase to their new C++/CX dialect. Does anyone remember the C++/CLR thing and all the talk about Office.NET? Yeah, right.

However, I am sure there will be a small tile-based viewer.

Dude, that will be a real value for money. Imagine the claim: "you can hear the difference when playing your crummy old 128K MP3s". Or, perhaps, they should just move into the "fashion accessories" niche and just acknowledge that they add real mother of pearl, white gold and diamonds to a perfectly capable digital piece of kit?

Yep, you are seeing scrapers' pages.