How are they poor choices? Methinks you're just looking in wrong places if they're languages you want to continue using at a job.

Embedded is hot right now, so sign up for the Jack Ganssle's Embedded Muse Newsletter http://www.ganssle.com/tem-subunsub.html. The jobs are going to be mostly US based, but some place to start.

And look for companies that you know are going to be using C/CPP from their products. Even if they don't have jobs posted, find someone on the engineering team via GH, FB, LinkedIn, their blogs, guessing their email address, conferences, where ever and email them a nice note talking about their products and how you'd love to work with them if they have a position open.

If you can engineer a piece of code, I feel you can also socially engineer your way to a contact somewhere you want to work.

Else if you really want to be some "rockstar" web developer (and I only ever use that term as a pejorative), then start using a relevant language, and learn how to talk to employers about how your deep C/CPP experience is actually an advantage that no other diploma-mill code-school grad is going to have.

It's never more depressing then when you've hauled in a candidate for a review because they've got great past experience, but the candidate has zero ability to relate that experience to conversation at hand.

They are poor choices because most jobs available to me are for java/ruby/python/etc...

I personally like Lua (that I NEVER saw a job opening for this), and C and C++ that I learned as a kid.

When I find the rare C or C++ job, usually they want 20+ years of experience or soemthing impossible like taht to me (I am 27 years old, obviously I can't have 20 years of experience), or are jobs in other countries, but unwilling to help with visa.

C and C++ became sort of too specialized, only use for high-performance stuff, even games now (what I really like to code) several companies prefer to use .NET or Java, the few C or C++ jobs that exist usually are in countries with some engineering history (like Germany, I saw lots of C++ jobs there), or in US (that has lots of jobs of lots of things).

I do feel kinda like you, though I'm more of a "jack of all trades". You can find C jobs in the embedded industry, in Brazil, have you considered it?

Yes of course, I got ONE interview (coincidentally, yesterday, in a company that makes cashier machines).

And I mean ONE interview over the course of 6 years looking for a job

Perto?

I actually have the completely reverse experience. I've been writing software for more than 15 years and C++ always got me a job.

When I was unemployed, I always had at least ten potential employers calling me for my C++ skills. And with C++, you can get a lot of various jobs like multimedia, systems programming, security, banks (even if you know nothing about it, they will teach you what you must know whether it's a big bank or a company doing embedded devices). My resume is rather generic and I don't have any specialization.

It's definitely not a useless skill. It seems to be a bit rare and I'm sure that's why I always had companies hiring me to write C++ code.

C/C++ are almost all I use all day, with some Lua for good measure. If you can find a register in a memory map and have a good concept of time and how it relates to the hardware clock you'd probably make an excellent embedded developer.

Our consulting firm sent 5 c/c++ dev's to a high profile client last month, the interview lasted 10 minutes before they instantly grabbed all of them. Anecdotal of course but choice of language is a poor excuse.