Hired a new guy who had a few years of experience, but less than most of the existing folks (most of whom, admittedly, had the same one year, over and over). He immediately starts telling us how we should be doing things. Case in question: Maven.
Now, Maven is a nice enough tool and he's probably right in that it is the new "industry standard", but it doesn't do anything that we need to do better than Ant. (Making it easy to add new dependencies to a project, in particular, is something that I anti-want to do.) The only advantage, as far as I can see, would be to allow the new guy to use an IDE other than Eclipse. The costs are pretty large, though. It was an uphill struggle to get the cowboys to use any build system instead of Eclipse's export. This would be a new build system, a new project layout, and either we could convert everything, which exactly no one had time to do (and did I mention the one year of experience thing?) or just add Maven to the already gigantic ball of mud.
Carefully explaining all of that, plus the point that futzing around with build systems did nothing to help us get stuff out the door, which is what we were having problems with and what we hired him to do, led only to blank looks and his decision to "demonstrate the advantages" in the project he was working on---exactly the reason we have a ball-of-mud problem.
