I am almost to the point where I'm laughing about it in general, though.
@WTFE said:
@silentsophia said:
@Shebakoby Having worked campus IT, it's probably both underfunding and people refusing to give up things they are comfortable with (thrown in with 'but it still WORKS!')
"But it still works!" is the single best reason to keep a system in operation. I know that among techies it's all annoying that someone dares to use stuff that was around when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, but the claim that "you could replace it with modern software/hardware and it will be All Better
" has been exposed as utter and complete bullshit so many times and in so many ways that smart business managers are correct to give such claims a dubious eye.
Replacing a system that works with a new, as yet untried, system is an incredibly risky venture. There are a lot of up-front costs with no conceivable return for months to years (depending on the size of the project)—and those returns may not even happen!
About three out of every four software projects are deemed failures by the people who make them (Source: Brooks), and the people making them have a vested interest in claiming that they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. I suspect, from years of observation, that were you to ask the actual end-users if the software project was a success you'd see that number rise to 9944 times out of ten thousand.
What kind of sucker places expensive bets where the people who have a vested interest in pumping up the success statistics are saying "well, you'll lose 3/4 of the time"? Why would you do that when you can use a system that is provably doing its job right now?
While everything you've said here is technically true, @Shebakoby's gripe is still valid, because 'but it still works' is often a tenuous statement at best, and what they really mean is 'but because we have sixteen workarounds, four kludges, and two pieces of gum in place, it still works!' and that shit only 'still works' in the sense that a rickety suspension bridge that hasn't actually dropped someone into a ravine 'still works' until the moment it doesn't, and that moment will be soon.
When it's getting to the point your program won't even run in a modern OS, and by 'modern OS' we're talking about things that became common a decade ago, it's time to look at more modern options and stop clinging to the familiar comfort of your old ass bullshit. People in the construction project planning industry and holding on to a program written for DOS, that won't even run on 64bit operating systems, and runs for shit in emulation, but then complain that everything ELSE they have to use runs so fucking slow because they're stuck using <4GB of RAM with half a dozen programs open.
There comes a point where you need to bite the fucking bullet and move up. The number of times I've talked to companies that have perfectly viable (maybe not perfectly, but still viable) modern alternatives but don't want to spend the money or time to train people to use them, is just infuriating.