I think you exaggerate. If you actually look at advertisements for c/c++ developers, they tend to contain words to the effect, "Must have 4-5 years experience

I think you exaggerate. If you actually look at advertisements for c/c++ developers, they tend to contain words to the effect, "Must have 4-5 years experience in high speed algorithmic trading", etc. But if you know any good-paying jobs that only require the skill level you suggest, point me in that direction. (I mean that--I can get away from my current huge and horrible codebase. Speaking of which, I remember being appalled by the consistently awful misspelling of virtually everything until someone pointed out that its DOS origins required 8 character limits on filenames. I suspect such charming beasts as atoi and strlen had similar constraints, if only for purposes of saving RAM on PDP 11s.)