Interesting Dilemma: Working in a Legacy team can be good if there’s room for ambiguity.
I keep on getting comments to move to the latest technology and I’m a little annoyed because based on taro blogs what I hear on here is that whoever is saying this is saying prioritize teams with scope and latest tech can be and seems to be a easy way to get scope. Even with the AI wave for example LLM apps are really business impact driven but it’s not gonna make me outdated as a backend dev.
More context in my team as a case study:
My teams goal is to make most of the users migrate to our new ui hosted on cloud but the legacy ui both our third party legacy and the legacy ui that the rest of the company makes more money is cumbersome.
Theres effort to change it due to a lot of tried and true working proof of concepts for our team since our team didn’t have the baggage of working with that legacy system that the rest of the company works on as an acquisition team. We have some other legacy offering we got acquired with that has some other strategic value to modernizing the company wide legacy. We are migrating both sets of users.
The dilemma I have is that I speak to these in office folks who work on the legacy system that’s honestly spaghetti and I can’t help but think I should want to work there cuz it will teach me fundamental skills. And I need to not get hung up on the fact that it is legacy and old technology.
The concepts are so proprietary not transferable but I have a strong feeling I could get in there create impact and when I switch jobs add the keywords to the resume and explain how I problem solved and handled ambiguity in the interview to show I am employable in a tech stack that’s more common going forward.
I am even looking at our tech stack as a whole and I am starting to think yes what we will do will solve a lot of the problems about this legacy system both the third party legacy that we own and the company wide legacy that makes the company money. But I just can’t help but think okay modernization into the cloud can be good but it must be for good reason. I’ve heard stories of this getting screwed up before because of bad system design.
Idk is this a sign I’m starting to develop mindset shifts? Idk it’s obvious to me after reading all the taro blogs that whether you’re in the latest tech or not does not matter. What matters seems to be that the tech should have scope for ambiguity. Only then In the context of career growth you’re set. Is this a correct understanding?
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Discussion
(1 comment)- 04 months agoEng @ Taro
The dilemma I have is that I speak to these in office folks who work on the legacy system that’s honestly spaghetti and I can’t help but think I should want to work there cuz it will teach me fundamental skills. And I need to not get hung up on the fact that it is legacy and old technology.
There are two opportunities that I'm seeing for working with legacy tech: 1. you can still make business impact there or 2. you can iteratively clean up the messy system. Regardless of the tech that's being used, when you are working for a company, your ultimate goal is to drive the business forward, and the technology might not matter if you're building a product on top of it and it doesn't affect your users. If the code is messy, you can put guardrails in place to ensure the code doesn't get any more messy, and then take steps to make the code cleaner.
I've seen people not want to work with a certain product because the design was not great, so they backed away. Then, someone joins, evaluates the system, improves it, and ends up getting promoted to staff level.
If I do have to make the case for using new technology, it can help with recruiting and improving engineer morale. A lot of candidates might see a company using outdated technology and immediately shy away because building experience with the outdated technology may not transfer immediately to their next career move. In conversations that I've been apart of with recruiters and hiring managers, we will ask for specific technologies or frameworks because we know that the person will have an immediate impact once they join.
