Ever since C++ got switched out by the major universities (in the US) for Java (circa 2001), there have been fewer and fewer people who learn/know C/C++ and who can then also understand pointers and other C related knowledge. It's not completely unused but for the most part it has been relegated to game programming and systems based work where speed is important.

I am sure there are exceptions or other reasons to this, but I feel that once the universities switched over to Java, C/C++ went on a big decline.