[doix]

To be fair when a company says they use C++, it can mean anything from "C with classes" to crazy metaprogramming with almost automatic memory management. Since they have over 10 years experience, they are almost definitely in the former camp.

I would never utter the phrase "I know C++" because it can mean so many different things to so many different people, and I don't think anyone truly knows the whole language.

Not using templates nor smart pointers doesn't sound that bad to me(unless the entirety/majority of the codebase was written with them in mind), the duplication thing is more questionable.

[ben_w]

It's not so much that this specific person didn't use smart pointers, it's that they had never even heard of them, and wasn't interested either.

"C with classes" is probably a good description, given what I saw from that one person — they didn't understand sub-typing either, and only had a cargo-cult understanding of access specifiers (revealed when the rest of us asked them why they'd duplicated a class file rather than subtyping).