[Periodic]

I just started working for a large enterprise corporation (one of the biggest financial companies in the world). We have a lot of old code written in Java that needs to be maintained. I've been trying to advocate new ways of doing things, but almost every time the other developers will respond with, "that's just not how we do things here."

Java has a very strong culture around it. I worked in academia and startups previously and I didn't realize that there is a huge number Java programmers who do nothing but program in Java. They aren't interested in learning new languages and will only grudgingly learn a new framework. Their biggest concern making sure the lowest common denominator can still maintain the (unmaintainable) code.

An example is unit testing. Our current "unit" tests start up a JBoss instance, connect to the development databases, and take ~5 minutes to run just one test. But I've been told not to waste my time working on anything more modular and that if I'm going to put in any time working on unit tests, I should contribute to the framework everyone else is already using.

It can be quite soul crushing.

[cruise02]

Where do you sit? I'm on the 5th floor, by the stairwell.

[raganwald]

I was on two, but Lumburgh asked me to go ahead and move my desk downstairs into the storage locker.

[dhimes]

Did you find the can of pesticide I left down there for you?

[Morendil]

> It can be quite soul crushing.

Always remember: "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission."

If you want to do better than the cultural norm demands, nothing's keeping you. What's the worst that can happen?

[Periodic]

I'm already doing it. I set up cucumber + webrat to run through some quick UI tests. I wrote a mock-object framework into the last feature I designed so I could test it. There's still a huge resistance to change. I'm just hoping I can show how useful it is in the long run. In the short run it just looks like I'm wasting a lot of time tinkering on silly side projects.

[brown9-2]

I don't think that your company's conservative attitudes are because of their usage of Java.

I think that "one of the biggest financial companies in the world" would be just as conservative and anxious about the tiniest technology changes with any language: Ruby, Perl, or Fortran.

The attitude you describe sounds like it has more to do with being a large financial institution and the type of place where software development is a "cost center", not a profit maker.

[jcapote]

This is exactly why java was invented (IMO). So you could pay someone $10/hr as a cog to solely work on the SupportEmailButtonFactory's

[joercampbell]

It is MUCH easier to show someone how something like a single 5 minute unit test holds them back from being bigger better badder. Unit testing should take less than a minute for ALL of them in a project to run.

Ask for forgiveness after you do something...

The other way to go about it is to 'gingerly' find the single ally, and build on that.