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This. This. This. Thank you for explaining the reality of the situation. I've worked with lots of different companies over the last 20 years with lots of legac

This. This. This. Thank you for explaining the reality of the situation. I've worked with lots of different companies over the last 20 years with lots of legacy intranet systems that are too large, complex, and customized to make upgrading them anything less than a multi-million dollar multi-year endeavor, and yet there's always someone who says, "Just rewrite the thing in [favorite framework]!" I've seen some programmers actually try to do the rewrites themselves. They code for a week or two, discover just how much business logic has been written into the thing over the last 20 years, and abandon it to start looking for employment elsewhere.

bradleyland 13y ago
> Thank you for explaining the reality of the situation. I love it when people use this phrase. The "reality of the situation". Yes, this is how things are, and they will continue to be that way until we change them. There is a world of difference between "refuse to support IE7" and "let's rewrite everything in [favorite framework]." Our startup is squarely in the enterprise space, and we don't support IE7. Our app will literally display a "you shall not pass" modal if you try to log in with IE7. Our client list includes a lot of local governments (cities large and small, counties, GPOs, etc), and we still manage to get by just fine without supporting IE7. I think you'd be amazed at how small of a market you're giving up by telling everyone you simply cannot support IE7. When you just accept "reality", you never bother to push the issue, and you never make progress.
mjolk 13y ago
>Thank you for explaining the reality of the situation. Where reality means a serious failure in tech leadership. >I've seen some programmers actually try to do the rewrites themselves. They code for a week or two, discover just how much business logic has been written into the thing over the last 20 years, and abandon it to start looking for employment elsewhere. Having been one of these people that "try to do the rewrites" himself, I left because paying off technical debt wasn't prioritized. It's not just about having a modern stack, it's about being able to hire maintenance programmers and not being forced into trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.
nulagrithom 13y ago
I can't tell which point you're arguing. Sounds like you're losing good employees. The 'reality of the situation' is that you're no longer retaining any young talent in your company, because you're stuck writing COBOL. The Frankenstein-of-an intranet program you've stitched together is now too big and too complex to work with; only the guys who built it in the first place have the guts to stick their fingers in the code. Sometime around 5 to 10 years ago, you stopped building software and started slapping a bunch of dirty hacks together to get things to 'just work'. The technical debt is insurmountable, and it's only getting worse. The software is 20 years old. What will happen in the next 10 years? Maybe then the company will be able to afford a rewrite... Except now the technical debt has crept in to the workflow of your users. People are doing things that computers should be doing. Every process involves some hacky workaround to get your ancient system to play nice. You're printing on dot-matrix printers and scanning it back in. Other companies don't know how to hand you data. CSV files over FTP transfer? Maybe we can just email you the files every week so your mail server can gobble it up and hand it to your ancient application? Other companies are scaling. Your bottom line is hurting. Now we're 30 years in, and the guys who built it in the first place are looking to retire. There's nobody you can 'pass the torch' because none of the new employees over the last decade have lasted more than two years; they all went on to play with silly 'kid' languages like 'Ruby' and that funny 'Cloud' fad. You'll have to find someone with talent, years of experience in your antique system, and yet isn't thinking about retirement within the next decade. Time to post a job opening for a COBOL ninja-rockstar!
SimHacker 13y ago
Since when was it a good idea to develop a system that locked users into an antiquated browser, and then insist decades later that all people using that application also use the same antiquated browser for everything else they do?

bradleyland 13y ago

> Thank you for explaining the reality of the situation. I love it when people use this phrase. The "reality of the situation". Yes, this is how things are, and they will continue to be that way until we change them. There is a world of difference between "refuse to support IE7" and "let's rewrite everything in [favorite framework]." Our startup is squarely in the enterprise space, and we don't support IE7. Our app will literally display a "you shall not pass" modal if you try to log in with IE7. Our client list includes a lot of local governments (cities large and small, counties, GPOs, etc), and we still manage to get by just fine without supporting IE7. I think you'd be amazed at how small of a market you're giving up by telling everyone you simply cannot support IE7. When you just accept "reality", you never bother to push the issue, and you never make progress.

mjolk 13y ago

>Thank you for explaining the reality of the situation. Where reality means a serious failure in tech leadership. >I've seen some programmers actually try to do the rewrites themselves. They code for a week or two, discover just how much business logic has been written into the thing over the last 20 years, and abandon it to start looking for employment elsewhere. Having been one of these people that "try to do the rewrites" himself, I left because paying off technical debt wasn't prioritized. It's not just about having a modern stack, it's about being able to hire maintenance programmers and not being forced into trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.

nulagrithom 13y ago

I can't tell which point you're arguing. Sounds like you're losing good employees. The 'reality of the situation' is that you're no longer retaining any young talent in your company, because you're stuck writing COBOL. The Frankenstein-of-an intranet program you've stitched together is now too big and too complex to work with; only the guys who built it in the first place have the guts to stick their fingers in the code. Sometime around 5 to 10 years ago, you stopped building software and started slapping a bunch of dirty hacks together to get things to 'just work'. The technical debt is insurmountable, and it's only getting worse. The software is 20 years old. What will happen in the next 10 years? Maybe then the company will be able to afford a rewrite... Except now the technical debt has crept in to the workflow of your users. People are doing things that computers should be doing. Every process involves some hacky workaround to get your ancient system to play nice. You're printing on dot-matrix printers and scanning it back in. Other companies don't know how to hand you data. CSV files over FTP transfer? Maybe we can just email you the files every week so your mail server can gobble it up and hand it to your ancient application? Other companies are scaling. Your bottom line is hurting. Now we're 30 years in, and the guys who built it in the first place are looking to retire. There's nobody you can 'pass the torch' because none of the new employees over the last decade have lasted more than two years; they all went on to play with silly 'kid' languages like 'Ruby' and that funny 'Cloud' fad. You'll have to find someone with talent, years of experience in your antique system, and yet isn't thinking about retirement within the next decade. Time to post a job opening for a COBOL ninja-rockstar!

SimHacker 13y ago

Since when was it a good idea to develop a system that locked users into an antiquated browser, and then insist decades later that all people using that application also use the same antiquated browser for everything else they do?