News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors. Parent comment

Re:Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors by adrianhoward on Monday April 23, 2012 @12:36PM (#3879663)
So, rather than update themselves and make up all that lost ground from getting too comfortable, they'll try to keep in place the old legacy systems only they can maintain.

The flip side of that problem is dealing with the bright young things of all ages who thinks it'll be a couple of weeks work to rewrite that COBOL legacy app in in Clojure/MongoDB. Y'know - the one that's been correctly doing the interest payments for the last twenty years. How hard could it be?....

Guess what's not fixed one year and £200k later... :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors by GFischer on Monday April 23, 2012 @04:21PM (#3880751)
Heh, that Forte app I was talking about? Plenty of people thought it would be "easy" to replace parts of it... at least two projects failed, I succeeded replacing part of it with a .NET program (the data entry part). Every new manager thinks about replacing it, and then realize it's insane.

Now we're looking at buying a proven software package - even though its price will be in the millions of dollars, it's better than trying to build it ourselves (I estimated three million dollars for an in-house project, and a big chance of failure, most certainly not satisfying user's expectations).

[ Parent | on HN ]