Jan de Boer wrote:One ex colleague of me was a freelancer, and he for example had to program legacy code in C, because that was the only assignment he could get. But then also had to know and study the latest and newest stuff for future assignments, to keep up with the market. So that would be quite an effort. I am not sure how often freelancers do legacy no employee wants to do, compared to how often they have to do the new stuff nobody knows about. Can you give me an opinion on that Chris? I am curious. Is doing legacy as freelancer an exception, or is something frequent?
I guess it will depend on your particular specialism and how many people in today's market are real experts in that skill. For example, there is probably a lot of really gnarly old code around in C that nobody understands any more, so I can understand why a good C programmer would be able to get contract work doing "legacy" work in C, either to maintain the old code or even to re-write it in C++ or
Java etc.
A niche platform is also useful e.g. big old mainframe systems. During the Y2K panic, there was a lot of work for COBOL programmers, because many systems were still using COBOL code that was more than 20 years old. You can still get work in COBOL, as a lot of that code is still around, but I don't see many contracts for it (e.g. there are 7 freelance COBOL jobs in the UK on
Jobserve today), although the daily rates aren't too bad if you can get one of those jobs. In this case, that might also be because so many of the old mainframe developers were fired when the big banks etc moved their systems offshore over the last 10 years, and now there's nobody left with those skills in the UK market.
I think it also helps if there have been a few major technology changes since your "legacy" skill was mainstream, because that means new developers probably don't have the same depth of knowledge of those things, and older developers have probably moved into management or become
architects since then. A lot of people moved from C --> C++ and/or Java in the last 20 years, so there may be fewer skilled and experienced C programmers around these days, for example, but there's lots of legacy C code still being used.
In my case, I used to do a lot of work with Oracle Forms and related proprietary tools, which used to be one of the main application development platforms with Oracle because you could crank out a working system in days/weeks instead of months/years. But Oracle has more or less shelved Forms since they got into Java, so although there are lots of old Forms-based systems around, few people are building new systems with it. There are still freelance jobs for Forms developers, but like many legacy skills it's kind of a dead end, and you probably don't want to get stuck there.
Basically, you can get freelance "legacy" work if you have the right skills/experience, but it's not something I'd want to base the rest of my career on.