Ask HN: Finding “Dusty Deck” Clients | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Finding “Dusty Deck” Clients

8 pointsjes4 comments

I am a 61 year old software engineer and have worked in high tech for 30+ years.

I have generally preferred to work on UNIX, Linux and macOS.

I'd like to invest my remaining 10 (?) years or so helping people to maintain their "dusty decks" or at least, work themselves out of the jams that their accumulated technical debt is helping to create.

My question is this: What would you do to find clients that have "dusty decks," where a dusty deck is a program that someone wrote years ago, probably in some language that is out of favor, and that yet still serves an important function?

Most of my programming has been in C, C++, Perl, Common Lisp, shell, make, Python, a minor dalliance with Ruby, etc. 30+ years of GNU Emacs.

If you wanted to find clients with dusty deck headaches, where would you begin to look?

I'd like my prospects to know that I know how things go, how there are never enough hours in the day to do all that we would like to do, and how I'm never going to shame them for having dusty decks. No scoldings are coming. Instead, I'm going to show up, look at what's happening, propose a practical way forward, and once things are back on line, if they want to talk about other things, that's fine too.

Thoughts?

Namaste, John

Edit: Add "Ask HN: " to title

> My question is this: What would you do to find clients that have "dusty decks," where a dusty deck is a program that someone wrote years ago, probably in some language that is out of favor, and that yet still serves an important function?

The legal industry has a lot of dusty decks but they're all for Windows; my firm has one Word macro package that is at least 25 years old.

Small firms will have few (if any) in-house software developers because of budget constraints; large firms will have more developers and dusty decks to work on. The primary focus will be line-of-business applications probably written in C# or maybe VB.NET. Complex spreadsheets and Access databases with VBA macros are also common.

> If you wanted to find clients with dusty deck headaches, where would you begin to look?

I would start with your network - are you 1 or 2 hops from someone who works at a law firm? Aside from that you would find a job in legal by looking for AmLaw 500 firms with an office in your area or that offer remote positions.

One option: pick an arbitrary bank that's been around for a few decades, perhaps one that isn't huge enough to have been investing in building internal engineering/platform capability for the last decade, but is large enough to have gone through a few mergers and thus internally runs on a mix of legacy IT systems from a mix of formerly independent smaller banks.

It may be more mainframes and windows boxes than linux. You might find production solaris machines.

Larger older telcos might be interesting as well.

There’s a lot more “dusty deck” scenarios on Windows platforms, just sayin’....

I think you're right. Thanks for that insight.

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