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From my perspective, there's loads of this legacy/boring crap (lots of PHP&Rails). As a "old" coder, I love those legacy apps that folk can't/don't give to thei

From my perspective, there's loads of this legacy/boring crap (lots of PHP&Rails). As a "old" coder, I love those legacy apps that folk can't/don't give to their internal team - it becomes consulting work for me :)

mattlutze 4y ago
That's the trouble though isn't it—leaving it to mature gracefully in the cellar gets you to a point where only an expert somilier in that particular varietal knows really what to do with it, and you pay through the nose for their knowledge.
pmarreck 4y ago
any tips on how to get started here? I have plenty of past Rails experience and although I'd prefer rewriting the stack endpoint by endpoint in something like Phoenix, I'd probably be amenable to other kinds of work yet staying in the Ruby ecosystem
- djbusby 4y ago
  I just kept telling my network to hand over their legacy projects. I'm not in the resume builder phase of the career. And folk (managers and devs) on the legacy project are happy to hand it over (provided they trust you). Helps all of their OKRs. And sometimes you get landed a fun legacy one where you have to rebuild some binary by de-compiling first (thanks for not stripping the binary previous long-gone dev) and then spend days re-factoring it to work with updated AT commands on the new hardware. And nobody's rushing you, cause you're like the only one doing it; and finding another person to even WANT to do this is $HARDWORK. I'm still out here doing VB6/VBA, Perl as well.
hinkley 4y ago
You can get people to stay longer as long as they are getting material to pad their resume. This seems counterintuitive at first, but one thing devs are good (bad?) at is avoiding pressure sales or getting “trapped”. An employee who feels stuck has lowered expectations from another job, and so it’s easier for them to leave. They don’t wait for “better”, they wait for “not here”. Amongst a group of people I talked about this with, we estimated that places that allowed resume farming saw between 6 and 9 months longer average employe retention times. For a place aiming at 3-4 year turnover that’s a substantial fraction of your goal.

mattlutze 4y ago

That's the trouble though isn't it—leaving it to mature gracefully in the cellar gets you to a point where only an expert somilier in that particular varietal knows really what to do with it, and you pay through the nose for their knowledge.

pmarreck 4y ago

any tips on how to get started here? I have plenty of past Rails experience and although I'd prefer rewriting the stack endpoint by endpoint in something like Phoenix, I'd probably be amenable to other kinds of work yet staying in the Ruby ecosystem

djbusby 4y ago
I just kept telling my network to hand over their legacy projects. I'm not in the resume builder phase of the career. And folk (managers and devs) on the legacy project are happy to hand it over (provided they trust you). Helps all of their OKRs. And sometimes you get landed a fun legacy one where you have to rebuild some binary by de-compiling first (thanks for not stripping the binary previous long-gone dev) and then spend days re-factoring it to work with updated AT commands on the new hardware. And nobody's rushing you, cause you're like the only one doing it; and finding another person to even WANT to do this is $HARDWORK. I'm still out here doing VB6/VBA, Perl as well.

hinkley 4y ago

You can get people to stay longer as long as they are getting material to pad their resume. This seems counterintuitive at first, but one thing devs are good (bad?) at is avoiding pressure sales or getting “trapped”. An employee who feels stuck has lowered expectations from another job, and so it’s easier for them to leave. They don’t wait for “better”, they wait for “not here”. Amongst a group of people I talked about this with, we estimated that places that allowed resume farming saw between 6 and 9 months longer average employe retention times. For a place aiming at 3-4 year turnover that’s a substantial fraction of your goal.