Ironically, as I’ve become more senior (11+ years at a faang company) I’ve had to do less and less of that “look around and understand everything” work because of time pressure. But I rely on my experience to be more confident that I can ignore the details and focus on the reason I’m in this file.

Well, that, and if it gets too messy I give up and call in a junior engineer…

This is because your operands are const char[]. That’s not a std::string.

C++ does, but it’s not a very efficient operation. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/basic_string/operator%2B