This CTO learned how to build websites in Chinese internet cafes

As mentioned in this article, Chinese programming education is weird. Middle/high school students are usually learning outdated stuff like Visual Basic 6, while college students learn C from a book that is based on and undefined-behavior-compatible with Visual C++ '98. (The book also includes suggestions like "if it doesn't compile, change the extension to '.cpp'.")

In addition, I have heard that the National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) still disables ALL compiler optimizations for fairness across Free Pascal, gcc, and g++. As a result, C++ STL becomes something to be avoided for performance.