I worked with a guy like this. He bragged he was the only one that knew the entire legacy codebase and he only shared parts with colleagues on his pretty sizable team to ensure he had a job and fat salary for life.

The the multinational decides a change in direction and fired the entire office, relocating it for regional diversification (this was not offshoring, spreading the work out across multiple teams). This was pretty niche stuff, and he became unemployable until moving across the country.

And I know of a company that similar was outsourced to. Fully outsourced with seemingly no internal expertise. Bleeding their client for increasing support prices year-by-year imagining they could do this for ever. I was in the team in that client that for two years, going from-scratch re-implementing the functionality, no cheap proposition, but within 3 years of in-sourcing the savings were already there.

Not all wizards know magic.

That smells familiar. I worked with one of those wizards and he designed everything to keep him the job. That was until he rode a motorbike into the side of a car at 100mph and someone else (me) inherited it. I had to start again because it was that impenetrable. Consequentially it turned out it didn't do a lot and I'd rewritten the bulk of it in ASP/SQL Server at the time in a couple of weeks reducing the cost of the entire platform to an hour or two a week rather than an entire "tier B" (whatever that was but I was told it was a lot and was tier F myself) salary. When I quit it took a few hours to hand over to the next guy.

Indeed, the word wizard was perhaps ill-chosen. These guys know this particular codebase, in all it's hairy glory, but not much else.

I don't think ill-chosen. In their eyes, they are wizards.

> Is it possibly not a management problem at the core? I mean, I know exactly what you mean about suits like to ignore the future, but I've worked with a few 'wizards' who, once they've got the job under their belt, use it to keep other people out.

> They'll not comment, help, document or whatever, and once they're doing that, they are uncontrollable. They can't be sacked because they're the only ones keeping the system running, and they won't help others train up. That seems a very difficult situation for the suits to deal with, even if they want to.

This sounds _exactly_ like a failing of management to me. If developers are expected or allowed to "just code" without documenting anything or training anyone, management is absolutely to blame for allowing it to go on.

well if you have 3 guys that are the wizards that can't be sacked, hire 3 contractors for a year long project to document things sufficiently that these guys become more sackable. Contractors of course have to be highly experienced as well, and well-remunerated, so maybe management doesn't want to go down that expensive avenue, which means it's a management problem.

Not to mention the years where they did not comment, help, document or whatever, and became uncontrollable sounds like a management problem over those years.

Your first suggestion might work, but having been there I know obnoxious programmers can be very obstructive, and put up some major barriers to newbies. That said, I think yours is a good solution if it can be afforded.

Per your 2nd point about long-term management problems, no doubt of it at all, but sometimes the new (and sometimes good) management simply inherits what previous mismanagement left behind.

Also perhaps you underestimate the power that programmers in well-bedded-in positions have. They can outright ignore management orders - experience speaking.

But a good post nonetheless, thanks.

The other side of the coin is that new hires can be very obstructive. 80% of new hires here are relentless politicians who snitch to management that they are "underappreciated" while making one idiotic suggestion after the next to show their relevance.

In reality they cannot do anything, so they scheme to get rid of people who can. During the battle no useful work is being done.

not that that doesn't happen, but in the context of the thread here, I imagine it wouldn't happen (or be more rare). You're needing to hire senior COBOL experts, and the 'senior' part is where the sort of behavior you're describing doesn't happen as much. Usually it's a mixture of confidence in your own ability, a dislike of politics, and an assurance that you can get work someplace else if/when you decide to leave.

The people that 'snitch' and feel 'under appreciated', and so on... my experience is they have trouble keeping work, are afraid of being found out, and do what they can to get rid of others who can recognize their lack of skills. I just don't think you'd find as many of those getting hired in the context of the needs of this thread.

I'd like to back up what you say because I wasn't clear enough in my first post - I've known a few people like that, a very few. Most are good and do their best. Despite the impression, idiots as I described are very much a minority.

If you're hiring people like this, I don't think old code bases are your biggest problem.

If you hire people like this you need to involve HR in better selecting who the org hires.

> if you have 3 guys that are the wizards that can't be sacked

Don't forget to also sack the management that looked the other way for years while this situation got where it is.

The zero asshole rule is non-negotiable.

Maybe if job security were a real thing, those guys wouldn't create obstructions to guarantee it. If employees don't get loyalty from management, why should the street go one way?

The problem is that management doesn't care about the human cost of their decisions and it causes technical problems.

In the real world this approach will most likely lead to getting 6 indestructible wizards instead of 3. Magical staff that needs to be supported by wizards should be shipped to Hogwarts and replaced

Management that allows one or a few persons to become that indispensable is a management problem.