Honesty is a Much Better Policy than Kindness
I have been spending the last several days - let's call it a week, getting familiar with a guy's code. Now I'm not going to say it's bad, or good - it's different from what I'd have done in that it's over-designed like a Spring app might tend to be - certainly J2EE has nothing on this design pattern, but that's really not the issue. It's his code, and I was learning it in order to be able to support, maintain, and extend it. Things were going pretty well, I think, and then I started to get the inkling that this wasn't in his comfort zone.
So I asked him.
What came out and asked him about what he'd do. He's been a very nice guy, almost to a fault of not telling me what is going to take him out of his comfort zone on this project. His answer revealed what he was comfortable with - me not touching his code. Fair enough.
Hey, you have to face facts. I'm the new guy. I've been here for a grand total of two weeks and until I can produce something that's good, going on great, and it deploys around the firm, and runs like a top, there are going to be a lot of people that, rightly so, have doubts about me.
This guy is no different, and I don't blame him.
What I do wish he'd done was to be honest with me as opposed to nice. It would have saved us both a week. I can do what I need to do now by building something outside of his codebase that simply makes calls to his system and saves the results. It's not ideal, but it's possible. It's also going to be built in such a way that it can run alongside his code in a Tomcat instance so that should the time come to more closely integrate them, the first thing we can do is to put them side-by-side and then merge the codebases.
It's understandable that I'm the new guy and need to prove myself. I also appreciate this guy's kindness. I just wish he'd been a little more honest with himself, and me, and it would have saved us both a bunch of time.