I was recently hired in a big company (thousands of people, to give an idea of t

Question

I was recently hired in a big company (thousands of people, to give an idea of the size). They said they hired me because of my rigor and because I was, despite my youngness (i'm 25), experienced as a C/C++ programer.

Now that I'm in, I can see that the whole system is old and often uses obsolete technologies. There is no naming convention (files, functions, variables, ...), they don't use Version Control, don't use exceptions or polymorphism and it seems like almost everybody lost his passion (some of them are only 30 years old).

I'd like to suggest somes changes but i don't want to be "the new guy that wants to change everything just because he doesn't want to fit in". I tried to "fit in", but actually, It takes me one week to do what I would do in one afternoon, just because of the poor tools we're forced to use. A lot my collegues never look at the new "things" and techniques that people use nowadays. It's like they just given up. The situation is really frustrating.

Have you ever been in a similar situation and, if so, what advices would you give me ? Is there a subtle way of changing things without becoming the black sheep here ? Or should I just give up my passion and energy as well ?

Explanation / Answer

I was in a similar situation at my previous company, where I was at for 5 years. When I joined in 2004, they were:

still using Microsoft Access for their databases (even business critical ones)
using Visual Basic 6 or Access/Excel VBA for development
using a lot of third-parties instead of using development resource in-house (business managers led their own development projects and 90% of the time put contracts out to tender without IT's knowledge)
gasp no version control.
When I left last year, the company were:

using .NET and C# exclusively
had banished all Access development
using SVN for version control
had 2 beefy SQL Server boxes and were migrating existing Access databases to SQL
all development came through the in-house teams and only went out to tender if resource was limited
At the time I had not long turned 21, and the next youngest in the development team was 30. I didn't do it all myself. The IT manager had joined the company at the same time, and wanted to bring all development through IT.

SVN was my first achievement. I had a meeting with my line manager, and highlighted a couple of situations where code had been put live or changed that had caused problems, and highlighted the fact there was no accountability - he couldn't blame anyone, basically - and after this he started to listen.

I then put a presentation together to the team and explained the concept of version control, and demo'd a couple of situations where SVN could help us developers out. The younger ones took to it like a duck to water, the older ones not so much but they tried and didn't complain about those that did use it.

Another major achievement was bringing a complete system in-house - I spear-headed a project that saved the company

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