The RockStar Makes More Friction
As an update to the RockStar programmer that I've mentioned previously, I've been hearing other folks complaining about him and his desire for change in order to show his worth at the shop. And to an extent I can understand his dilemma - if you're a highly paid developer and you're not changing something then you might begin to wonder if they think they need you - as opposed to a junior developer. And that's the big mistake. It's not about your perception of your value - it's how the business values you. Much of the time they can be out of skew with the business valuing you less than you think, but it's just as bad if the reverse is true.
Bad plays are made by desperate people. If you're feverishly trying to show how valuable you are by instituting change so that you can point to your list of accomplishments at review time then you may actually be making things worse for yourself than doing nothing. Take the guy that's changing code simply because it's not Java 1.5-like. This guy might very well miss a few of the subtleties of the existing code and then the converted code may look like new Java code, but it's not working in the same way as the previous version.
This has happened to our RockStar. He's also gotten a few folks cross with him because he doesn't like the fact that testing is not using JUnit for testing. But that's just a tool, and the real issue is not if you're using that tool, but is proper testing being done. Let's face it - long before Java came along, good testing was being done. So was bad testing and no testing and everything in between. But it seems that RockStar, like so many Java fanboys, believe that if you're not using the standard tools then there's something wrong and it needs to be fixed.
It's sad, and I want to tell him to look at what he's doing, but I know that he's not interested in listening to me. Maybe someday when he gets enough experience in this environment he might see that it's really different than he thought, and maybe he'll ask. But if he does he'll be the exception to the rule as most of the Java fanboys I've known simply write this place off as wrong and get a job where more fanboys work and they get to do it the way they want.