I have had great success in re-working the requirement when something seemingly impossible has been proposed by a user. IMHO, this is because what makes something impossible is usually an additional (and often negotiable) requirement.
Sure there are still times when this won't work either, but it should help reduce that number.
Well I'm here to say that you can break the shackles. At 37 I might still toil in the Java mines during the day, but at night I am learning Ruby, Rails, NoSQL, zsh and other Open Source/less than enterprisey stuff.
I might not be able to debug a rails app as fast as I can a JEE app but I can still grok/reason/solve issues on the platform.
You absolutely can break the shackles, and should. I'm just saying it's (admirably) insubordinate.
From a typical boss-man perspective, your performance is reduced by this extracurricular work. You're probably working late into the evening, and thinking about Ruby during the day. You're probably planning a move to something better.
You can't be fired for that alone, but it puts you at risk of being in the socially excluded, not-getting-the-benefit-of-the-doubt category.
One of the issues with side projects is that admitting to having them breaks the Fundamental Subordinate Dishonesty (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/fundamental-s...). You're "supposed" to be putting all available energy into your job, or at least respect authority enough to put effort into that illusion. Vacation is okay: that's just taking a break. Off-hours work isn't (in typical workplaces).
I remember talking to a previous boss saying, "I've been thinking of starting skunk works project 'X'. Where 'X' was introducing an ORM, JQuery, or cleaning up some old code/modules. And the answer was always "I'd rather you work on the backlog [of features]."
IMHO, he line of thinking where employers want you only grinding on today's problems rather than additionally incrementally honing the skills to innovate is a broken methodology and does not work for software. The barrier to learning these skills is too low to expect people not to want to do these things and it keeps getting lower.
I think of it like this, Craftsmanship is about having the discipline to dot 'i's and cross 't's. It's about scrubbing out the pans after your done cooking a meal, because while you might be able to keep reusing a skillet without cleaning it to produce delicious meal after delicious meal quickly, eventually, you're going to send a customer to the hospital.
Keeping code in small readable chunks that have automated tests makes it easier to maintain and if this hasn't been your experience then I would say you haven't been doing it correctly.
This is similar to a realization I had a few years ago about my own career and training. I got it in my head that my company should provide training to use the newest technologies for their benefit. It only took a few years of the "it's not broken so don't fix it" culture to realize they don't care how it works, as long as it works. And that I am responsible for my own growth. The cost is using my own free time and resources, the value (aside from learning) is that I get to choose what I will learn, hello JQuery/Ruby/MongoDB/Heroku.
TLDR: Growing on your own is more fun and enriching than being dependent on others.
This may be true. But, if you have a site running with older technology, I wouldn't want to use new technology just for the sake of using new technology.
When something works, why take the risk? Especially if it involves money.
I agree, that is why it's up to the developer to improve their skills if they don't want to keep writing Action classes and POJO JDBC classes for that legacy Struts 1.1 webapp.
Usually reserved for legacy databases with lots of custom queries and jdbc code, mybatis (previously ibatis) is a pretty flexible solution. Hooks into Spring pretty well too.
IMHO this the "Get's things done." part of the developer skill set defined by Joel Spolsky. A wizard at solving problems without an eye on maintainability or the long term picture.
The antithesis of this is the "Smart" guy who can design the "perfect system" upto and past the release date.
