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Depending on the application, this can be easier said than done. My company has a lot of legacy apps. To de-risk and modernize they decided to write a replacement for one of the bigger ones. I first heard about it probably 12 years ago, after it got its first client and had already been in the works for quite some time. From what I can tell, they are still working on it, but the strong push behind it has faded, and the legacy app still exists and runs a vast majority of the workload. They put millions into it. If the rebuild route doesn’t seem like it will work (OP might know this without the conversation), I think education is another viable path. When I don’t know much about a system, I don’t want to work on it. OP sounds the similar. Taking the time to learn about it and become the expert can make the tasks seem less daunting and can allow a person to find creative solutions or better ways to do things, working inside the existing systems. For example, we had a legacy ITSM system everyone hated, so did I, until I spent time with it. I got a project working with the guy who had been running it for 10 years. I was able to learn from him, I got the white papers on it and read about the various ways things work, and was able to build things in there to solve problems I had, and our team had. In some places I went to the code to see how something worked, because the documentation wasn’t clear. In other cases, I ran a series of tests to better understand certain features. The fear and uncertainty around working within the platform went away, and I started to enjoy it. I became the go-to person in the company on some parts of it, because I took the time to get good at it. 9 times out of 10, when I hate something, it’s covering up for a lack of knowledge and fear around it. Then I have a choice, I can be depressed and miserable, run away, or take it on and learn/grow until the fear subsides and the depression linked to it fades. |
Good point, I've experienced that. Equally I've experienced great frustration at things I can't understand, not from stupidity or lack of trying, but because the information is guarded or lost.
Interestingly we're getting back to the roots of why Stallman first set out on the Free Open Software mission.
The OP mentioned difficulty with opaque/obscure proprietary systems. I wonder if that's a factor at play?