I'm one of those guys that has to fight like hell to retain talented developers, so I understand where this guy is coming from. However....
He admits it's usually about money. Well duh. Then he has to pay them more. If you want to hire great talent to work on your legacy Java app then guess what? You're gonna be shelling out a lot of money.
In our business, we work on both new, cool functionality but also have legacy code that has to be maintained. Naturally, nobody wants to work on that, but it has to be done. The trick is to balance a developers workload so that they aren't always stuck in doing legacy work. If one of our developers was forced to work on maintaining legacy code for any great length of time, then I would fully expect them to leave.
tl;dr; Pay your developers well and find ways to give them opportunities to work on cool new stuff. Neglect either of those and they will leave you. It's really not that hard...
Comments
I'm one of those guys that has to fight like hell to retain talented developers, so I understand where this guy is coming from. However....
He admits it's usually about money. Well duh. Then he has to pay them more. If you want to hire great talent to work on your legacy Java app then guess what? You're gonna be shelling out a lot of money.
In our business, we work on both new, cool functionality but also have legacy code that has to be maintained. Naturally, nobody wants to work on that, but it has to be done. The trick is to balance a developers workload so that they aren't always stuck in doing legacy work. If one of our developers was forced to work on maintaining legacy code for any great length of time, then I would fully expect them to leave.
tl;dr; Pay your developers well and find ways to give them opportunities to work on cool new stuff. Neglect either of those and they will leave you. It's really not that hard...