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Comment by still_grokking | Hacker News Reader

I don't think burning in sum hundreds of billions of Dollars (or even more) because "it's OK being irrational, because emotions" makes sense.

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The business case is that you won't be able to retain good engineers if you refuse to rewrite your AS400 COBOL app.

I’ve wondered whether these good engineers are really a net benefit. They crank out something spiffy, move your big systems to it, and then disappear to work on the next hotness, leaving an already burdened tech team to support yet one more spiffy stack that is not quite as reliable or easy to use as we would like.

I think you need to either talk to your system architecture function or get a system architecture function in your organisation.

Managing this stuff is a job, and it requires discipline and organisation. It's one of the few functions of an IT department that is left once you go to cloud (as dealing with Oracle's bullshit is then gone). The younglin's doing development in the business functions have to play by the rules - and the business functions need to agree that there are rules or they will :

a) spend much monies on the issue you describe

b) get cracked open like fresh eggs by any passing hacker who is keen on sports cars

I'm not sure I would call people that would rewrite something just because it gets boring otherwise as "engineers". I think the proper term would be "children".

Yet the best engineers in the field aren’t working on legacy banking apps. The problem is that once a product is put into production and the hard problems are solved, the engineering becomes significantly less challenging (unless you’re in an ultra rare scenario of exponential growth).

The problem we have in software is that we have engineers build bridges and then somehow expect them to stay around to paint the thing, change light bulbs, etc and stay fulfilled. A person who is an expert at making new things won’t like being in maintenance. It’s that simple.

Sure, that's absolutely true. But it doesn't mean that you need to rebuild already working stuff over and over.

It's much more fun to improve the status quo by inventing something nice as to repeat the work of the past generation (only painting things in a different color).

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