I gotta debate the following statement made in this article:

working in Agile is like being a teenager working at McDonalds — there are so many processes and suffocating constraints that few expert cooks (or in our case, engineers) can reach a reasonable fraction of their potential

If your processes are overwhelming you, you are not doing agile. Executable code is the the benchmark measurement of progress in agile, and if something you are doing is not working, change it. This is agile. If these don't match your current process, you are not doing agile, you are merely going through the agile motions and calling it agile. And nobody has ever produced anything of worth by just going through the motions.

I feel for your situation. The problem is not with the profit driven company. Even profit driven orgs can understand the concept of investing now to avoid paying off technical debt later. The problem the project leads or senior developers didn't have the courage or skill to tell management "no."

Never forget that management's job is to get you to say yes because they believe that if they asked something that was genuinely impossible, you would say no (ex. we need a new Internet by next week complete with established user base but don't use existing code or hardware infrastructure).

Programmers often forget that they are in high demand. If you refuse to compromise your professional values, the worst that happens is you find another job in a week or two.

That is an excellent observation. Correct code is possible in either Ruby or C++, but you are unlikely to find any in the wild.

Ruby is for when you want to do it fast. Python is for when you want to do it right.

Best advice: skip ITT. You are better off taking free courses at coursera. I would provide link but Voat is being buggy on my phone.

Coursera offers basic to advanced coding classes, as does codeacademy. Go to community college or find a University that offers a distance learning program if you need a degree.

Also, prepare yourself for a couple shitty jobs if you don't go the 4-year university route. Unless you attend a university that attracts recruiters, you will end up with your first job or two being crappy before you build the knowledge and reputation to apply to a place like the NSA.

Whatever you do, skip the for-profit universities. You will be unable to get a job interview with them on your resume.

Bitbucket is what you need. You get unlimited private repos for free. What they charge for is access for more people. I keep all my personal projects there.

You are probably wasting your time on VB. Not a lot of stuff uses that. Learn Java and C++, then learn Python or Ruby. Once you have those, you will be able to learn lots of other languages.

Learn about databases, how they work, and how you interact with them programmatically. Most jobs involve this at some point, yet it is rarely a focus of any college program.

Also, take the math. If you really enjoy programming, rest assured that your brain DOES work that way. Just start with easy classes and work your way up.