If your giving up after loosing one battle, your not going to last long in a corporate environment.
But if you bang your head on the fucking wall over battles you can’t win, you’re not going last long in life. Make your trade-offs where they’ll do the most good.
If you like the company & want to keep working there, my advise would be to change your approach, & consider the longer term commercial issues.
From his manager’s point of view, the longer term commercial issues ARE being considered.
- Cost of developing solution in RoR v’s Java
… when the programmers all know Java already, and more Javniks graduate every year…
- Cost of maintaing solution in RoR v’s Java [this includes training for staff]
… when the staff maintaining the solution all know Java already…
- Independant opinions of Industry trends
… when businesses in general and managers in specific can’t see beyond this quarter’s profit margin.
It’s easy to get all philosophical over these issues, but the bottom line is that managers rarely see anything other than the bottom line. If you want to prove to your manager that you can develop better more maintainable code faster in Rails (and if you do want to prove this it better be true) then do just that - on your own time, write up a demo that shows off the features you believe are worth changing everything over. If they still won’t see it your way and it’s still a big issue for you, at least then you’ll have experience developing an actual application, something useful to show others who might be more amenable to the change.
You can talk to your manager and IT guy and coworkers until the next ice age and not change any minds. But walk in a few weeks from now with an 80% (or 120%) solution developed in your spare time, and they’ll start paying attention.
