[SomeGuyHere]

I've been in the programming industry for 7 months now and its a bit different than what school prepared us for. At my company our program manager gives us swim lanes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swim_lane) and from there I must design and code the program. I get some help from a couple of guys who worked on the program and I also have the original business requirements, swim lanes, and existing code. There's alot involved with the BizTalk, SAP, C#, Symbol Scanners, and an auto generated (and seemingly inflexible) Data layer/business layer generated by CodeSmith. The company I work for calls their process agile programming.

I expected much more documentation in the professional world and the code I'm reading through looks like spaghetti code to me, but it may simply be my inexperience. There's not much commenting and two of the main guys who built the program are no longer with the company. Finally, the more I learn about C# the more I'm afraid that I'll get boxed in to what I do now without the power and flexibility of a language like C++ under my belt.

Your experience and insight is appreciated.

[Mr Gray]

Sounds normal to me, I have discovered that there are a few companies that claim to be able to create a system or application but when you get down to it all they are doing is hacking a system together and then coming back later to fix what they originally hacked with a new hack. This is AGILE development gone wrong, when all you do is hack systems together.

If I was you I would look for a new job when you have been there for a year then try to be a little bit more selective in the type of job/company you work for.

[Nitin646]

Hey bro!! can you post more info abt swim lane in general?

[Ken Sharpe]

You are probably right -- most companies fail utterly at producing good code, so if you don't think it's good, a safe bet is to go with your gut on that.

[Daxthecon]

Wow. Holy Crap wow. Thats murder on your programming career.

There are great chances out there for C# but there are greater chances with Sharepoint and any other .NET advance. C++ and C are great secondary languages to use for the application world and very powerful. While VB.Net and ASP.NET are the languages the web world prefers. PHP is also in demand but it's limited AD access is what keeps it sidelined by companies. As long as you know how to work a project it doesn't matter the language level you have. You can always learn a language but business structure is what they want you to know. I suggest start looking for a better job or put all in 150% effort into fixing the errors your co-workers are making and practicing proper software techniques. Good luck to you.