You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I take whenever I introduce very basic version control at the various 3 to 6 man shops I find work at these days.
I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.
> I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.
Have you considered introducing Mercurial or even Subversion?
While Git may be a kind of an industry 'standard', if you're starting from zero, some of its concepts may be a bit mind-bending for folks, and it has often been commented that Hg seems to have a more beginner-friendly interface.
And if branching isn't going to be used (a large strength of git/hg), then Subversion may have an even simpler mental model (svn of course does branching, but the others are more optimized for it).
If folks are doing FTP-push deployment, then moving to 'just' SVN-push (commit) deployment can be an improvement.
There was a new hire who was told to make a small change in a piece of server software, found the repo, read the docs, made the change, ran it in testing, and pushed to prod. Cue the 'senior engineer' screaming bloody blue murder because he'd been directly monkeypatching the servers for 3 years with no vc and no backups.
This could have been written and 2014 and 2004 (hi, it's me). There will always be people who don't use it and others who won't remember a time when they hadn't used it :P
Hello, fellow old person. I was just remembering PVCS (Polytron Version Control System) since it was the first I worked with back in the 80s. Now I see that it's still out there, with the latest release in 2021. Which is insane.
>But senior developers can understand the problems that they claim to address, and why they are important and common problems.
Senior developers have simply grown accustomed to the warts, and accepted their fate - some even celebrating their mastery of the warts as necessary knowledge.
The only pragmatic reason not to change things is the compatibility chaos that will ensue and the resources required - not that problems don't exist.
Most standard tools we use today are not obvious to beginners nor would they be the first thing that beginners reach for.
But senior developers can understand the problems that they claim to address, and why they are important and common problems.