[aeorgnoieang]

> Unfortunately there's just not a lot of value to being able to put on your resume that you're an expert at an older language that nobody has heard of, built on an in-house framework that will never be used outside of your current company.

I think this is, fortunately, only approximately true. Most of my career to-date has involved exactly this kind of work and it's certainly not true that there's no value in it, even on a resumé or mentioned in a job interview. And certainly some non-zero amount of people derive considerable value from exactly that kind of experience as some non-zero number of employers or customers need someone with it.

And, in a lot of ways, working on legacy systems can be both immensely fun and rewarding. Even just incremental improvement in or around such systems can itself be immensely valuable, e.g. setting-up automated builds or deployments, adding integration tests (to make future refactoring easier and safer), or rewriting or replacing a key portion of the system using newer tools or with a better design made possible due to the wisdom accumulated by a system performing real work over a significant period of time.

[noir_lord]

Most of my career has been working on legacy projects (or fixing broken ones), I like greenfield well enough but I’ve no preference for it over maintenance.

There is as much pleasure in making something broken work properly as creating the thing (imo).

It’s a steady career as well, most programming is maintenance outside of the fail fast world of startups.

[on_and_off]

Even at my current job in a startup, 90% of the code I own can be considered legacy.

The startup is 7 yo, I joined almost 2 years ago.

The gap between old and new features is enormous .. and it will take years to reach some cohesion.

[oaw-bct-ar-bamf]

I am relatively new to a project that is being sold and used in the order of millions for approximately 25 to thirty years.

It was refreshing to find out that one of the approximately 7 languages that contribute to the final executable that was abandoned in ~2007 has been revived and is now (2016ish) being maintained by Eclipse

These kind of things make you realise that the Silicon Valley way of doing things is not the silver bullet.

[on_and_off]

Yep .. it is always painful to hear stuff like "if you don't use [insert whatever is hype right now]; then you are not a real engineer" coming from a colleague.

People that have spent their careers in the silicon valley have a very distorted view of tech.