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.
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).
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.