**Personally**, some people on the street don't really work with C++.
They work with a language like C which has the ability to use encapsulation [classes] and the only object-oreinted technique of polymorphism. Most Quants and PhDs (I have tremendous respect for them) are not software engineers by training. They have taken introduction CompSci courses and are trying to build complex applications which need to behave like "soft" real-time systems. It isn't an easy task!!
You find memory leaks in programs, methods with 50+ lines of code, use of C style pointers, no use of templates, header classes including other class definitions rather than just forward declaring classes, etc. The only design patterns that one might know are the singleton and the strategy pattern. Rarely do people use libraries like the Boost libraries or ACE libraries to ease development. As a result, a lot of time is spent on things which could have been avoided by using relatively newer programming languages like Java or.NET. The argument that I receive is that C++ is faster and the other languages are slow. I shrug my shoulders and think to myself, I am glad the concern for speed hasn't been high enough to warrant resorting to Assembly.
I don't mean to flame anyone or upset anybody in particular at all. This has just been my experience. This is not to say that everyone is like this, but the basis is to make money by using building, testing and using the model(s) ... so I guess I can understand.
You have to be forgiving, but you should be a catalyst and introduce "good" change.
