[grewil2]

After years of struggle, our IT-department recently managed to conclude the migration of all COBOL applications from machines running on Unisys 2200 to Java EE running on GNU/Linux. As a Java developer working with the latter, the final months were wild. The old COBOL greybeards (some 70+, convinced to stay until migration was finalised) certainly didn't go gently into that good night, literally throwing insults at us, leaving meetings, wishing us bad luck etc. We could never be sure they had given us all information about their stuff, out of spite. I hope I don't finish my working years like they did.

[jhayward]

This reads like the tale of a junior dev who doesn't even know what s/he doesn't know, and is full of hubris about how they're "finally getting rid of this old crap" that they don't really understand, don't have the decades of domain insight that are built in to it, and don't respect anyone because of the above.

Just sayin', I wonder what the tale from the other side of the table was in this story.

[bgorman]

I have never heard of anyone wishing bad luck or malice to other developers. If this tale is true, I don't think the greybeards deserve much respect based on their conduct. You simply cannot disparage others.

[JdeBP]

Calling people names, like "greybeards", is also disparagement, of course.

[duncan_bayne]

So, how was your IT department treating them at time time?

As valued employees, pairing with the Java devs on code, attending team lunches and other functions, generally integrated with the teams to which they were passing on their life's work?

Because to be honest I'm struggling to believe they were being treated as equal members of a team if they were behaving like that.

[KWD]

I think the statement "convinced to stay until migration was finalised" already answers your question. I'm sure there would be some that would have wanted to, and been capable of, picking up a different language, but that is not how companies do things. It's replace with the new, even though a lot of business/application knowledge could be retained otherwise.

[grewil2]

I think the (governmental) department treated them alright, and they made good money too. They were not the types that liked to blend with the younger devs, even for a cup of coffee. I approached them two years ago and asked if I could work with them for some time to exchange knowledge, but I only got a one line email response "not interested". It's not unlikely that they were annoyed that the applications they had developed over the years, which they kept pointing out were superior, were being phased out.