Let me brag first: I could be that girl in the interview. Yay me. But am I the only one to think these are obsolete skills? Isn't there more to software than knowing C++ at this level? Would I want to spend 10 years on learning it as well as I know it now, today in 2011?
Don't be so sure. I'm currently writing C code that has run on Linux (Intel, both 32 and 64 bit systems), Solaris (Intel 64 bit, 32 adn 64 bit SPARC) and Mac OS-x (not sure, since we don't actually deply on Macs, but we have several developers that use them), and most of this code deals with binary files and some custom network protocols, so alignment issues are important.
It was also neat to see my code run flawlessly under Valgrind (we were attempting to debug an issue with the 32 bit Intel Solaris build---it may be a compiler issue since that's the only platform (out of the ones listed above) the code broke on, but I haven't investigated the issue enough to say for sure).
