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

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!