You only hurt yourself down the line. My last job had not improved their own product, processes, tools or frameworks, so everything was still stuck in the 90s. Their product was build on an discontinued an proprietary database and server system you never heard about, jQuery UI from 10 years ago and other BS.

However if you don't upskill yourself in this situation you will be unemployable in the future, because all other employers demand modern technologies, git, docker, unit testing etc., which I was yelled at in meetings for suggesting it.

[–] brezelradar@feddit.de 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

all other employers demand modern technologies

There are a lot of employers that'll throw good money at you for maintaining and extending their outdated crap. Have you ever considered learning COBOL?

[–] AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

No wonder COBOL programmers are paid a lot, because what would be a 1-liner for "hello world" in other languages looks like this in Cobol:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    DISPLAY 'HELLO WORLD'.
    STOP RUN.

This is already $6000 worth of code right there!

[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wonder how much open source COBOL is out there for LLMs to harvest.

[–] CanadaPlus 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The thing people always overlook is that these legacy systems are only still running because they're super important. Nobody's hiring a junior COBOL dev to maintain NORAD, and hopefully nobody's contemplating putting ChatGPT in charge either.

The move if you want this kind of job is to learn a language that's not quite a dinosaur yet, and have 20 years experience in 20 years. Perl or PHP maybe.

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