Our company has grown a lot the last couple of years, so we have had many new employees, many directly from university. At least two out of three come with great ideas how they shall "save" our company, really great and successful (... but we are, already!). Each of them has his own way of how tools and working methods and plans should be drastically changed, if we are to prosper and grow. We couldn't possibly switch programming languages or project management tools or build systems or version control systems every time some new employee comes with this great revolutionary new tool. Even changing horses every time our technical university jumps onto some new academic fad... Those revolutionary new ways are almost always academic fads, and I am surprised/disappointed how much a university can make quite smart university students into evangelists for a single belief without teaching them anything about alternative ways, and essentially teaching them "This is The Answer" without telling them WHY this is the answer. You wouldn't believe what even university Masters can present as if they were laws of nature - such as individual packet routing in networks, the necessity of parenthesizing conditions in programming languages, or the obviousness of case significance in identifiers. (I could list a few dozen other examples as well.) So when some new employee brings forth a new revolutionary tool or method: Give him/her some time to analyze the needs of the company, make a critical evalation of how the current tool satisifies the needs, how the new proposed tool satisifies the needs, identifying and quantifying the benefits of a switch, and the cost of a switch. Make the new employee write this down as a change proposal for older employees to evaluate. We have done that a couple times, when the new employee withdrew the proposal quite rapidly when met with counterarguments and real figures for the cost of change. (That is where they usually fail, believing that replacing a basic tool is no more difficult in a 300 man company with a few hundred customer relations as it was in a four-students group work with no legacy ties and no obligations after the report is handed in to the professor for evaluation.) True enough: Sometimes, we could be more open to change, but still, changes should be justified. We have also had cases where new employees have continued to insist on changes, we have "given in" and after a while realized that the claimed benefits were not gained. The only positive result of spending a lot of reso
