**High-Level Background:**

My workplace has been around for decades and many of the employees here likewise. I joined earlier this year but have plenty of experience elsewhere. 

I taught myself Git in my first job way back when, which was essentially a 2-man project. I screwed up many things and practiced many things, so I come from the school of hard knocks. As I wrote in an email to some of the department heads 

> 
> […] I am not a git expert. For better or worse, though, in this company I am :\ […]
> 
> 
> 

We just switched to Git/Bitbucket from a more antiquated source control (one that locked files, copied files, etc). Most people (and old-timers) are acclimating to the new protocols and I and a few others are helping where we can. 

**The Guy I am Dealing With:**

There's one dude, an older guy, who is a curmudgeon. I get along well with him but he's a tough nut to crack. he doesn't want to learn new things, he wants it to be simple. This is not a dumb guy, btw, he has been programming in C++ since it was released and, among other things, he wrote the driver we use to connect to our DB from our product (from scratch). A lot of the code he works on is his own stuff, essentially libraries that other departments use, although enough of his work is within shared code files that others modify as well. 

He's accepted that I know what I'm talking about but he's an old dog; the concept of Git being "diff"-based vs actual file has usage scenarios he doesn't want learn, like creating new branches. He wants a simple procedure.

In my defense, I am a pretty good teacher. I have worked with a number of the other employees and they seem to get it now and are firing away at their code using Git/Bitbucket.

**What He Wants:**

Back to the curmudgeon, he wants ONE branch to work on. He doesn't want to checkout new branches, switch branches, he doesn't want to know about branches. He wants that he does his work, commits, does a pull request, and continues his work. 

This is just one guy, most people in the company are willing to change. I have sat with him for probably around 5-6 hours in total over the last week. I enjoy it because we respect each other, and I also consider it my company duty as I am the best equipped here to do that (many find him tough to talk to so he kinda works in his own bubble, plus not many here have the comfort level with Git that I do). Additionally, he has wrapped his mind around some of the core fundamentals of Git, like staging, local vs remote, etc. 

Although not ideal, would it be a "good enough" workaround if every so often, he merges from the master branch into his own and just works on his one branch for the foreseeable future? Hopefully I can incrementally get him to be a good "Gitizen" over time. At worst, the guy's likely to retire in a few years.

Is this workaround a ticking time bomb? Will it screw up the master-branch's history (this is assuming all merge-conflicts are resolved correctly; something not a problem for him)?