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There are 2 teams. Team A: One working on JSF, Hibernate, EJB stuff. And Team B: working on IOT, Cassandra, kafka etc. I am member of team B. But I have also had to help out team A. Offcourse everybody wants to work on what team B is working on. Now there is another microservice that needs to be developed using some ancient technology. My manager asked me what can we give the other team to work on and I suggested this microservice. The other team's manager rejected the idea and now my manager wants me to do it. Says I can lead the team as well. I would rather work on the latest technology than work on this microservice that nobody wants to work on. How can I get out of this ?

I have let him know about my displeasure on this.

Then there is the architect who was supposed to be prototyping this, but was stalling it because of it's old technology. Thought I would get more information on this, but he turned around and is trying to dump this thing on me by telling the manager that he talked about these technologies with me.

How can I get out of this ?

I am thinking if I just have to do this then ask for work on other new technologies as well. Equal time spent on both kinds of work. How can I handler this and come out with the best outcome.

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    What are your career goals? Do you want to be a team leader in general, or an architect? Do you want to only work on the cool, new, sexy stuff, regardless of title/seniority?
    – John Feltz
    Commented Oct 20, 2016 at 21:08
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    There is nothing wrong in working on old technology per se. It represents a different challenge to working on the latest stuff. However remember that in 5 years time your bleeding edge stuff will be that next 'old technology', and that software spends most all of its time in maintenance rather than in development. So if you want to work in IT you will have to come to terms with working with old code at some point.
    – Peter M
    Commented Oct 20, 2016 at 21:38
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    Somebody is left holding this bag. Make a case to management as to why a specific esteemed colleague is a more appropriate choice than you.
    – Myles
    Commented Oct 20, 2016 at 21:59
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    If it's a microservice, how long is this going to take really? Especially since I'm assuming this is an upgrade to a microservice, because if it were a new one, why pick technology nobody wants to use?
    – Erik
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 8:35
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    Two suggestions. 1) Try to find a job where you'll get paid for doing what you want to do, and only what you want to do. (Good luck with that one :-)) 2) Bite the bullet, do a really good job at the stuff you don't want to do (but for which you are collecting a paycheck, no?), and use the results to show the manager how good a developer you are.
    – jamesqf
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 18:34

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Your boss is your boss, you're a developer he has the right to put you on some old technologies.

But did not say I will be the team lead. I want to work of cool new technologies rather than old ones irrespective of title. I would like to be an architect though

Well sorry but I have to step in.

Being an architect is not about working with new cool technologies. It is about first choosing among a panel of technologies that will be the best for your project according to some criterias :

  • The skillset of your team, if the developers has already been choosen, but the best would be to choose them after what you know you would work on.
  • How mature the technologies are and their community.
  • Will your technologies and what you know about them really scale if the application is expected to grow a lot in terms of code and datas ?
  • If your project need to live for 10 years, are you sure your new cool technologies have a decent chance to be there in 10 years and you would still be able to find decent documentation at that time ?
  • If you use frameworks (angularjs for client, spring for server,...), are you sure that you will be able to integrate all what you need. For instance let say you need to draw a gantt chart on a browser, currently on angular2 I can find only a 0.0.1 version. Meanwhile in angular 1 you can find a much more mature working module. You can take the bet to use angular2, but there is nothing telling you that this module will ever be fisnihed and not given up, this is a high risk. Or you can try to migrate the angular 1 version to the 2, but you project's manager may answer that he doesn't have the money for this.
  • ...

Taking the last technologies without even think if they fit has high chance to lead you and your whole team in a death march.

Currently I'm on angular 1 for the front and Java/JPA/Hibernate/Spring.PostgreSQL with Rest. A good usage (yes in bold, lot of people complains about ORM, Database but it's mostly an interface chair/keyboard or organization problem) of all those mature technologies provide me everything I need. And because of how long spring/angular have been there, I'm pretty sure that I can find something working and mature on the net for any new need that i can be asked.

PS : still I agree that working on JSF/EJB (v2 probably) sucks.

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