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Question

When job hunting for a developer position, what looks better? Working on a renovation project/creating a new application OR supporting legacy applications.

With 3 years of experience I've spent my time supporting legacy J2EE applications. I have also added new features and overhauled a small part of the application. But I have never been part of a renovation project or created a brand new J2EE application for a company.

Is this a hole in my job experience/resume? Will it hurt me when I look for a job in the future?

Answer 1

The smart employers look for people who are teachable. They still want skills, but they care less about whether or not (for example) you have 3 years of experience in a technology that has only existed for 1 year.

Answer 2

It depends what you're being hired for. If someone is looking for a maintenance coder then experience supporting legacy applications is probably a big benefit. There's definitely something to be said for someone that can come in and support someone elses work.

What kind of job are you looking for? You need to tailor your resume a bit so that you get the types of job offers you are looking for. If you just spent 3 years supporting someones code and you really don't want to do that anymore, highlight the areas of your experience where you were developing new code (even if it was within an existing system).

Answer 3

Depends. Does your prospective new employer want you to renovate/create a new application, or do they want you to support legacy applications? Depending on their needs, different resume points will have vastly different values to them.

Answer 4

It depends on the job. If you have no experence in creating applications/design, employers will not look favorable if they are looking at designing new things. If employers are looking for maintence programmers then they would be more favorable towards the supporting legacy apps.

Answer 5

I think they will be interested in your experience in general. When looking for specifics you show that you know the technology that you used. There's no need to specify that you never created a new project from scratch (can't be that difficult to figure out?).

I would be more concerned with using words like 'renovation project' because I have no idea what that means and chances are that other people might be confused by that term as well, it sounds like something to do with improving your house.

Answer 6

This depends a lot on what kind of employers you are seeking as I could imagine contriving examples where each is better than the others. Renovation project doesn't make a lot of sense to my mind so I'll echo that sentiment.

What kind of work are you wanting? If it is using bleeding edge tools, then supporting legacy applications may not look so great while if you are going for jobs which use languages that were popular many years ago, e.g. VB6, then supporting legacy applications could be a strength. Another point is how do you want to slice your experience as any of the areas you describe could be skewed to favor another.

While you have identified a hole in your experience, how much it impacts your job prospects depends on so many other things that this isn't likely to be the deciding factor.

Upgrading existing applications can be useful in seeing what was done and getting some debugging skills nailed down and staying within certain bounds. Is this what you meant by a renovation project?

Creating a new application can be cool and I'd likely think you may have done this in school or when initially learning Java but I could be wrong.

Support legacy applications can refer to a couple of things. Fixing bugs that customers identify and work arounds without changing the code comes to mind as one interpretation. Implementing enhancements and other minor features are another interpretation to my mind.