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It's slightly more complicated than that, depending on how much time has passed since the creators of the system left, but you're correct in general. Usually,

It's slightly more complicated than that, depending on how much time has passed since the creators of the system left, but you're correct in general. Usually, since admitting that they were stupid to let all the knowledge of the system walk out the door requires more emotional and intellectual flexibility than managers who let this sort of thing happen possess, the biggest obstacle isn't even the money... it's getting the managers to admit they're idiots.

criddell 6y ago
The person who started the thread added this comment: > The company that built this ERP solution went bankrupt 6 years ago, and we don't have the source code. It uses PostgreSQL and MySQL, and also has a built-in key-value database for which none of us has any credentials. We don't have the source code for this software (it's built in C and delivered to us as compiled packages..). Sounds like finding their old employees wouldn't help. They need to find old employees of the company that wrote the system and hope they kept a copy of the source code.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > and hope they kept a copy of the source code Which from a legal perspective might be fraught with peril, at least in theory. In practice, if the company folded then it'd depend entirely on the litigiousness of the current owner of the copyright, which could range from "nobody" to "some holding company consisting almost entirely of lawyers chomping at the bit to eat you for dinner".
at_a_remove 6y ago
Yes. I had an ancient system where the holders of domain knowledge kept either dying or retiring, one by one. I was frantic, but nobody listened to me. The system began to fail on the day I announced my departure. I would later find that one of the previous architects had reached out to my manager to offer assistance, but this was never made known to us. It wouldn't have even cost anything. Anything but pride, I guess.
hinkley 6y ago
Coworker used to have a boss who literally said where she could hear: "Lose a monkey, get a new monkey."

criddell 6y ago

The person who started the thread added this comment: > The company that built this ERP solution went bankrupt 6 years ago, and we don't have the source code. It uses PostgreSQL and MySQL, and also has a built-in key-value database for which none of us has any credentials. We don't have the source code for this software (it's built in C and delivered to us as compiled packages..). Sounds like finding their old employees wouldn't help. They need to find old employees of the company that wrote the system and hope they kept a copy of the source code.

yellowapple 6y ago
> and hope they kept a copy of the source code Which from a legal perspective might be fraught with peril, at least in theory. In practice, if the company folded then it'd depend entirely on the litigiousness of the current owner of the copyright, which could range from "nobody" to "some holding company consisting almost entirely of lawyers chomping at the bit to eat you for dinner".

at_a_remove 6y ago

Yes. I had an ancient system where the holders of domain knowledge kept either dying or retiring, one by one. I was frantic, but nobody listened to me. The system began to fail on the day I announced my departure. I would later find that one of the previous architects had reached out to my manager to offer assistance, but this was never made known to us. It wouldn't have even cost anything. Anything but pride, I guess.

hinkley 6y ago

Coworker used to have a boss who literally said where she could hear: "Lose a monkey, get a new monkey."