Just scored my personal red flag bingo in new project:
- engineers who work there for 20+ years
- their own in house build tool
- "we have Jira so it means we are agile"
- "we have Jenkins so it means we do Ci/cd"
- git adoption is "in progress"

Does product have sales ?

If yes, I see no problems.

It's your job to bring new things here. But warning, you'll have a LOT LOT LOT of resistance to changes.

I remember when I was around 21-23, on the first real dev job it was a java 1.3 project (Without generics) and people who wrote the project come originally from cobol.

Theier aprocha to database ? Load the FULL FUCKING table in RAM, then iterate with "ruptures" as you would do in Cobol.

I fought for a year to prouve that using "where" and "order by" in SQL query is actually good

It took 6 more months for thewm to allow me use inheritance (Yep, in Jva)

But the product was making millions and was stable. Few bugs here and there, but the QA process was very solid. I didn't see a match in QA tto this day (I'm 38 now)

GL !

@NoToJavaScript i got a similar situation. working on a java product that makes millions in sales and is keeping the company profitable. its 7 years old, written in java 1.8 but there are static functions everywhere and rare usage of inheritance. classes like AnalyticsManager and DBAnalyticsManager are manually maintained to have similar naming static functions and their similar functions are called by reflection during runtime .
why the fuck are profitable companies running on thin threads :'(

@dotenvironment

Because maybe that's why they are profitable.

You can't really understand the economics behind it unless you are made part of it, and even if you want, you may not be included, because it ain't your job.

If their approach has worked (must have, as you said they are turning a profit), analyze the situation from an accountant/risk analysis pov.

Modernize the current stack, with a big development cost, inherent definite risk of things breaking (further cost and potential customer backlash), and huge cost in training or hiring, since senior skills are now maybe outdated.
All this for buying some years of stability (to the point your third party vendors provide).

Vs, keeping things as they are now and keep turning a profit, with the infrequent (if expensive) case that we need to replace someone with a very specific skillset.

You need a *very* strong case to push that on a profitable company.

Yet all in all, I agree OPs situation looks like stagnation and horror. 😂

"Git adoption"?!

@Oktokolo

Makes sense. They want to adopt right before they are adults to avoid all the angst in between 😂

@NoToJavaScript Got a similar one: the architect / lead developer insisted on having all business logic as stored procedures in Oracle. 25-30 input parameters, hardly any debugging possibilities, logging was done by appending text to one of the output variables.. The reasoning for it? It had to be FAST. And new database connections take TOO MUCH TIME! So we SACRIFIED readability, stability, quality and maintainability to save a few milliseconds.

Even as a junior dev I knew this was insane, but you "can't argue with experience" now can you?

Heh, I have been working at my current company for 4 years now. I was working on a bug they "just found". I happened to be working on a similar feature with a similar name (not actually related). So I get blamed for this halfheartedly. I said I think this bug is old. The boss says it couldn't have been in there 10 years?! I looked, it was in there for 15 years! lol

I just scored a new project similar to this... They have a team of old school devs, I mean, I'm replacing someone who's retiring and that's about the general age.

The concept of 'backend' was unfamiliar to them. They code web front in Java. I mean, it maybe made sense back when they build it many, many years ago.

And I'm gonna be the hip'n'young *female* dev who's gonna come in and tell these people how you do Azure & web development. >.>

It holds a promise that I get to use the whole range of my dev skills but at the same time it can be bad, real bad.

@lankku good luck with that

I found that many of my colleagues aren't put off when I, a new dev in his early 20s, is explaining something to them...
But I know that this can also go sideways

@NoToJavaScript If by sales we mean holds old customers hostage and acquires new ones mostly by buying it's competition, then yes? It's not my first rodeo and honestly I don't think it's worth fighting. They pay me enough to make me potential kidnaping target and I have other less generous but more interesting contracts on the side to keep me sane

@PAKA Well, if you want to make money, I have a solution or you.

Learn COBOL.

On the same project I mentioned, the “batch” processing was still in cobol, so I needed to learn it to write new batches and fix stuff.

I put COBOL on linkedin. (Now remember, 22 yo, 1 year d dev experience)

I had multiple offers from Banks and other financial instutuons in a matter of weeks. Payung (back in the day!!!) 80.000 EUR / year. Which was insane. My first salary as a dev was 36.000 EUR/year.

But I decided my mental health to “NOT” work with Cobol is more important for me lol

I’m pretty sure they still run cobol tho.

@Oktokolo As in not every team uses version control yet, and some use it but in a very weird way for example they place whole binaries of different tomcat versions next to their code inside the repo

@PAKA wow, they definitely will either burn you as a witch or start worshipping you after showing them the magic of git history rewrites, rebasing and cherrypicking...

hi there. I am very interested in this topic and your reasoning behind it. It's really interesting. I enjoyed reading this.