As long as their salary keeps increasing, I’d say go for it!
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.
git is considered modern?
I don’t mean to bash git but I’d have assumed git is utilized in some capacity in every dev environment.
The Lead Dev/team Lead was quite arrogant and in his own mind the worlds best developer who had all the answers. If some technology or software was not written by him or already existed in the 90s it was “useless” and not fit for the company (without him having looked at it or the docs). If asked why we would not use X which was out for years, well maintained, had no critical bugs would solve problem Z we where having, he would reply “because i said so” and insist in writing out own variant - which ended up having 10% of the features, 10 times the bugs, terrible UI and would take months to develop.
When support repeatetly told him that users had issues with feature X because the only error message on a 10 fields forms page was “Error”, he would respond that this is a user problem, the end user is clearly stupid (despide used in a field where you need to study for years) and that support must hold training sessions so the users can “learn” how to use his product.
As such, the company would reject git and instead email each other files and changes.
Each meeting felt like living inside a Dilbert cartoon.
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There are a lot of employers that’ll throw good money at you for maintaining and extending their outdated crap.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?
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!
Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes on a code base can reveal some opportunities for big improvements in maintainability 😜
Also new people are still motivated to change stuff. They are not yet worn down by bureaucracy.
Just rewrite it with 80% functionality and force migrations on the users. Once the remaining 20% “edge cases” that require serious effort hop to the next job - where you where hired to “maintain” such a system and “just add a small feature here and there”. Ooops.
I see it as a win, I love refactoring bad code . Just feels so nice afterwards.
Especially when you can remove thousands of lines of duplicated ui code.
That’s so much better than writing new code
