Leveraging Legacy Technology

Most of us want to work on the latest tech. In addition to being more fun in general, newer tech also comes with less baggage, more job opportunities, and often solves emerging problems. However, beggars can’t be choosers. Eventually, either due to a surprise job loss, major economic turmoil, or a bad job situation that you have to get out of, you’ll eventually be stuck working with legacy technology in some capacity. In tech, the tip of the iceberg is comprised of organizations using the latest and greatest, and beneath that is a substantially larger number of environments that are using something developed between 5 and 40 (or more…) years ago. At some point in the future, whether it is in the next couple of months, or the next 20 years, the economy will crash and burn to some degree, taking many jobs with it. It’s simple mathematics. While you might typically avoid older technology, you’ll find that there are situations where you have to deal with it, simply to get the bills paid. Your approach to this problem will determine your level of success once things recover enough to get a better job. In effect, it’s like someone just showed up at your door with a dump truck full of manure. You either have to deal with a load of crap, or you have to figure out the right place to put it so it can become fertilizer. The willingness and ability to do this can often be a career changer. You can effectively leverage working on a legacy system, provided that you know what you want to get out of it, other than a paycheck. A lot of developers tend to look down on work positions that use legacy technologies. This is excellent, because if you are any good, you can often have your pick of the jobs. Better yet, if you pick the right jobs, you can quickly build up non-tech skills and expertise that will help you compete with people whose technical resumes are more current. Episode Breakdown Experience With Older Tech The most obvious benefit to legacy tech projects is the opportunity to learn legacy tech. While this may not seem like much, if you can still get a job in an older technology stack, that means people are still using it. As stacks get older and there are fewer people using them, the price per hour for getting development help often goes up. This is especially true of stacks that are more than 10-15 years old. Additionally, experience with older tech is often very useful even in jobs with newer technology, simply because you may have to integrate with it. Networking People that work with older tech also tend to be older. In addition to often being good mentors, they tend to know a ton of other people in the tech community. While you might not think that the mentoring aspect is too valuable when you are dealing with older tech, the fact is that you can often bounce ideas off of people who are used to an older way of doing things and gain surprising insights. Many times, people who are using legacy technology are very good advisors on how to deal with non-technical problems in your career, such as office politics. If they’ve survived in one position for a while, there’s probably a reason for it. Additionally, you might serve as a mentor to THEM on some of the newer stuff. This can be advantageous to both of you. Experience Converting To Newer Tech If you end up on a legacy project, learn well, and have experience in new technology, you can often be heavily involved in porting that technology to a newer platform. This will give you more experience in BOTH technologies, as well as a ton of other useful non-technical experience. As it gets harder to find developers of legacy technology, you might a useful (and lucrative) niche in converting business systems from an older technology to a newer one. Lots of people do this and make a lot of money with it.