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> Having left the C/C++ professional programming world several years back to wallow in other pastures.

As someone who wants to follow the same trajectory, how did you do it? And how did you dissociate professionally from being seen as the C++/systems guy?

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Having gone through a very similar journey, it took around 2 years for me to completely disassociate myself from a specific programming language. It was more a 'me' problem since I leaned on to a programming language rather than a problem domain.

I still consider myself a systems programmer mostly writing glue code in Go/Python and jumping into C/C++ as required to improve performance when required.

I have a bachelor and master of EE. My first job out of college starting my programming career (in Fortran), eventually moving to C and then C++. As my career progressed, I made myself into a software systems engineer. After several years of that, I started taking on full blown systems engineering things which I greatly enjoyed. That started my distancing from software development, mainly from interests but also because I became to expensive to write code. Fortunately, the companies I worked for were willing to support my career goals. YMMV.

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