I'm going to agree here. C++ is the first language I really did anything with (a sierpinski-trinagle generator for KDE, when I was in 7th grade) and simply didn't understand, at the time, what the memory-related issues were. I allocated stuff, and it worked. I returned pointers to the stack, and the code worked. Sometimes I got segfaults, but if I changed the code a bit, they went away.

This is not the sort of understanding you want people you're paying to write software to have.

(And yes, I do see this from time to time. "Do you know anything about programming!?" "Yes, just enough to be dangerous.")