Here is a paradox worth money: the world's banks, insurers, and governments run on programming languages most schools stopped teaching decades ago — COBOL, Fortran, RPG, Assembly — while the people who understand them retire. Three trillion dollars move over COBOL rails daily; the average COBOL programmer is pushing sixty; fewer than two thousand new COBOL graduates appeared worldwide in a recent year. That gap between “systems that cannot fail” and “people who understand them” is exactly what a legacy-systems consultancy sells: risk assessment, round-the-clock support, and modernization.
The site itself practices what it preaches: one fast static page, eight language panels with origin years and footprints, live industry rankings, a countdown to the 2030 talent crunch, and a contact form that asks the grown-up questions — codebase size, urgency, whether the key expert is retiring. And the philosophy is stated outright: no rip-and-replace. Understand, stabilize, then modernize, on the client's timeline.
Students: “boring” technology pays, and maintenance is most of the industry — in some mainframe shops over eighty percent of the budget goes to keeping things running, not building new ones. Hiring managers: anyone can pitch a rewrite; selling risk reduction to a CTO with a forty-year-old codebase takes domain courage, and AI-assisted discovery that cuts research time by more than half — led by humans — is the honest version of the AI story.
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