|
|
|
|
|
|
by mytailorisrich
486 days ago
|
|
|
A good way to secure your position is to be the go-to expert for a product with many years of life ahead of it. Fixing stuff on a legacy product may make management happy but if that product is discontinued next year then you haven't accrued technical expertise valuable to the company (but you may have built a reputation as a fixer and quick learner). So, as usual, it is a balancing act. Edit: this is my perspective from the embedded world. It probably applies generally, though. |
|
|
When times get tight the new projects get shitcanned and the 10 year-old cash cow design gets the promised new features.
One crusty project I worked on was a legacy control board for a piece of restaurant equipment. The customer, the company that built the actual machine, had been building this product for 40 years. It had been through two PCB redesigns and two different microcontrollers, but the logic was tried and true and had to survive. A port of the project from 6800 assembly to C had completely gone off the rails and the contractor was dumped. All it took was a 20-opcode fix to a routine that the contractor just couldn't grok.