You get people like that everywhere. The only difference is in the numbers. They are not programmers. They are simply people going through the motions. We have a couple here. One of them will be coming on my Idiomatic Perl course in a couple of weeks. I think it will blow his mind.

Tactics for dealing with it vary with the situation. I'll assume that you're not senior to them (if you are it all gets a bit easier). Here are some suggestions:

• Suggest to management that peer reviews of code would be a good idea. Go into the reviews with well-rehearsed arguments on why your methods are better.
• Be a good example. If the code that you're writing is better in some way, then demonstrate that fact by showing how it's faster to write, faster to run, more maintainable or whatever. Eventually you'll be a good reputation and will be given all the more interesting tasks to do.
• Put some of your code into reusable modules. This will make you even faster, but will also make it easier for you to suggest that the others use your code instead of reinventing the wheel.
• Maybe suggest running small classes in more 'idiomatic' Perl. Just a couple of sessions introducing some of the cooler features. Pick a couple of sections from Effective Perl Programming and base it on that.

Hope that helps, if it doesn't, then look for another job.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me