I've been an IT executive hiring Millennials - our young workforce - since 2002. I spent years observing them closely and can tell you they are not interested in learning legacy systems. To be fair to them, they've never had any exposure to the older systems and don't have a good reference point. They've grown up with technology that is more intuitive and easy to work with. Most of the legacy systems don't fall into those categories.
I think that for now, American companies can look to outsourcing to solve their problem but for how long? The existing developers that work in India and other countries have learned these legacy systems but what about the younger developers that will be coming up the ranks? They too will have no interest in dedicating their expertise to legacy systems.
Companies heavily invested in legacy systems will have 2 choices going forward: one is to prepare to pay a hefty premium for Baby Boomer developers or developers in other countries who are currently experts in legacy sytems. These developers may have a ready made consulting gig to fall back on during retirement (Not too shabby!).
The second choice is for companies to begin to look at the long term viability of these legacy systems and develop a road map for either moving away from these systems or developing more robust interfaces and tools for maintaining them into the 21st Century with a younger workforce.
In my experience, most IT executives have been concerned with what to do about maintaining legacy systems for years now but keep putting it on the back burner to be dealt with in the future. They have too many other fires to deal with and problems that demand their immediate attention. The problem is that if we don't address it now, we will be forced to deal with it on a reactive basis in the future. As we all know, dealing with reactive situations cost companies a bundle of money to resolve and dilutes IT's credibility in the process. Don't want that to happen...
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