How to sell a new technology to coworkers (and bosses, by proxy)

Have you been doing programming for a long time, in some old and boring, non-intuitive language or technology? Have you found that new technology everyone is talking about? Maybe it is Ember.js, maybe Angular, maybe even Ruby on Rails a couple of years ago. Do you burn from desire to use that new thing every day? Well, let me tell you from the start, it is not going to be easy.

I have had the same experience, with couple technologies in the past. Always looking for the next best thing. Whether it was asp.net MVC, Ruby on Rails, or git, as it was in my previous job. I failed the .net bit, and looking back, I’m not sad at all that it happened that way. Selling Ruby on Rails was different. Although I didn’t know about marketing and sales as much as I do today, I had a totally different approach, maybe not the best one, but the field to plant those seeds wasn’t very fertile.

The thing I changed was, showing the new technology to my coworkers, getting them to love Ruby, the same way I’ve fallen in love with it. Showing them the simplicity of creating a basic CRUD web application in Ruby on Rails. Making them the main advocates of the technology.

That is the basis of any product acceptance. Teach just one person, make them fall in love with the new thing. Talk about it, make a presentation, offer to teach anyone mildly interested in it. Because you have to get a following. And if you don’t get anyone to follow you, remember what happened with my asp.net try?

Selling to your manager, while going around your coworkers won’t work from the start. Your manager has their job, and while your job is creating beautiful and fast widgets, their is making sure you, and your team, produce enough widgets each day, to fulfil the set budget for that month. And they are really strict about allowing new technologies to come into play. Also, they have managers of their own, who they report to. Maybe there is some vendor lock, and you are unable to do it. Maybe the cost of training 150 people to use the new technology, just because one person says it’s cool, isn’t a really smart thing to do, especially if they appreciate their job.

Building a following is hard, and maybe the technology you found doesn’t have a big following in the world, or maybe it’s just too soon for it (Smalltalk anyone?). But if you are prepared to advocate it, and teach anyone who is mildly interested in learning it, create smart scripts with it, to help you with your daily job, putting it in contrast with the old and ugly technology you are using now, then you will succeed. Even if you don’t, you’ll have another tool under your belt, and you can always follow many of us who went freelance, to work with the technologies we like, and forget the ones we dislike.