Greenfield Projects are a Myth, unless you are a Startup

In the corporate software engineering world, “Greenfield” projects tend to bring a lot of excitement. A type of project that is free of legacy code. You don’t need to worry about breaking some obscure edge case logic held together with a piece of painters tape. No need have to learn an existing data model, or read through some spaghetti code written by the probably time-constrained engineer from 5 years ago. You can start fresh and clean.

But here’s the thing, this application will still need to talk to the legacy systems around it. Or at the very least, it will have to ingest data from those systems asynchronously. Which means, while you don’t have to deal with the code-level legacy pain points, you will have to deal with the architecture-level tech debt. Arguably, the most ignored and the most difficult tech debt to address. But why am I pointing this out?

Well, it’s because dealing with legacy infrastructure is a skill that tends to be overlooked. Some of the best engineers I’ve worked with have had an exceptional ability to build integrations into legacy systems. They are also able to anticipate potential issues and mitigate the likelihood of them occurring. These kinds of engineers are highly valued.

I would bet that modernization of legacy systems account for a large amount of projects at all software engineering shops. It’s also, ironically, a harder problem for LLMs because it requires a deep understanding of the legacy systems and the decisions that went into building them. LLMs do well in well structured and well documented codebases that are built with well documented languages. Every company is probably “working on modernization”, and by the time they finish, the “new” system will already be old. Modernization is a never ending battle.

So I guess my main point here is to say, don’t shy away from working with legacy systems. Legacy systems are where seasoned engineers are built. It’s where you earn your stripes.

Best of luck, and happy shipping!

-Wisdom