I know someone who said he is sort of doing that. I do guess it's hard to find a company that is open about having such a problem.

Perhaps you can look for consultancies. After working as a consultant multiple times, I’ve seen plenty of legacy code. That’s one of the (many) reasons we were hired for. It’s usually a side-effect of something else (e.g. company culture, business strategy).

Also, often technology stacks that are not as "trendy" anymore have lots of jobs where they are in desperate need for help with complex legacy systems. Working on mainframes with Cobol is a classic example, but personally I also see, for example, lots of Ruby opportunities to work on bigger existing systems. Not sure how it looks like in the Clojure space though.

True, I’m just thinking of all the php out there…

@UHQ12T97F What about being a side-effect of hiring consultants? 😄 @U01KQ9EGU79 You mean Facebook? I mean.. Meta? It all makes sense now, they want to refactor and therefore they changed the name.

@U028ART884X Also a good point. Someone (maybe a consultant) had to deliver something and the final code was very poor to say the least. It’s difficult to judge without the context. Ideally, if you do a good job, you should be easily replaceable as anyone can understand and maintain what you wrote. Unfortunately, some people prefer the opposite: have clients depending on you because you’re the only one able to understand the mess. 🙂

the OP question is so Feenk (https://feenk.com/) if SmallTalk is not a problem 😛

The banking and insurance industries have many refactoring tasks and legacy systems. Have been working at a consultancy that specialises on them in Germany.

Just came across a related http://dev.to post, might be interesting. https://dev.to/missamarakay/i-collect-and-prioritize-tech-debt-for-a-living-4p7i