Re: In my experience...
I was once given the opportunity to excel by supporting a “tiny little unimportant system” used by only one team. So I innocently contacted the current outsourced support, a lovely old gent who was a joy to work with. Alas he was heavily involved in updating his personal status to “dead”, hence my new opportunity.
To start my journey I tried to find a new outsourced supplier, then I hit a brick wall. There wasn’t anyone, anywhere who offered support in this programming language. I had found a genuine dead language, invented by a tiny little company which had died a decade ago. I asked six different employment vampires to find anybody who had it on their CV, ten grand to whoever found me a live body willing to help us. Three of them found a likely lad, alas he was our current guy.
So he sent me all his notes and the very well used language manual before politely leaving the house.
I supported the software for five more years, putting it into the risk register each year at the nuclear risk and result level. It cost the company no money and only resulted in a 20% increase in my tendency to kill users who asked stupid questions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
