The Lindy Effect:

#Nassim #Taleb popularized the
#Lindy #Effect:
the observation that for non-perishable things,
every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.

A book that has been in print for a hundred years will probably be in print for another hundred.

A technology that has worked for decades is,
by virtue of having survived,
more robust than the shiny new thing that hasn't been stress-tested by time.

The forty-year-old COBOL system running bank transactions has survived countless technological upheavals,
it has survived the internet,
and it has survived DOGE.

It works.

The sexy new microservices architecture might work,
or it might introduce seventeen novel failure modes that nobody anticipated because nobody had encountered them before.

But maintainers of legacy systems are treated as janitors rather than guardians.

We act as if working on old code is a punishment,
-- a career dead-end,
when in fact it may be the most consequential work in the entire organization.

When the flashy new system fails,
everyone notices.

When the old system keeps running, nobody does.

Invisibility is the maintainer's reward for competence.