The Talent Cliff: A Quiet Crisis

Your Pick developers—often in their 60s or 70s—have been silent heroes. They know the quirks in your billing engine. They remember why a field was repurposed back in 1997. They can trace a record ID through 15 layers of indirection. They wrote and rewrote mission-critical logic over decades, accumulating unwritten institutional memory. But now, they’re preparing for retirement.

The Impact of Attrition

The problem isn’t just the loss of coding skills—it’s deeper:

• Business logic is undocumented
• Dependencies are not always obvious
• New hires lack context
• Your systems may be stable today—but brittle tomorrow

Organizations that wait to act often find themselves with operational crises, expensive consulting bills, or worst-case scenarios: production downtime with no one left to fix the problem.

Why CEOs Should Care

This is not just an IT issue—it’s a strategic business risk. Legacy systems house the logic behind:

• Sales and order management
• Pricing rules
• Supply chain workflows
• Customer contracts

If those systems fail—or even stagnate—your ability to compete, comply, and grow is jeopardized.

Business continuity, compliance, and future scalability are all at stake.

The HR View: A Shrinking Talent Pool

HR teams have long struggled to recruit Pick developers. Universities haven’t taught MultiValue for decades. Job boards return few qualified resumes. Many who remain are working as contractors or semi-retired consultants. Demand is up. Supply is vanishing.

If your organization is relying on:

• One or two key individuals
• External contractors on call
• Deferred hiring due to budget delays

...you are one resignation or health issue away from a crisis.

Four Approaches to Consider

Here are four strategies—complementary, not mutually exclusive—that HR and executive leadership can pursue now:

1. Knowledge Capture and Documentation

Start by systematizing what your senior developers know. Build a team to shadow, document, and extract institutional logic.

Tactics:

• Record code walkthroughs and architecture sessions
• Create field-level dictionaries and metadata definitions
• Use AI tools (like MYRA) to ingest and analyze Pick source code
• Encourage senior staff to narrate why things work the way they do

Why It Works: You can’t modernize what you don’t understand. Capturing logic while experts are still available is your best insurance policy.

2. Upskilling & Cross-Training

Train a new generation of developers to understand enough of the legacy system to maintain and interface with it—without needing them to become Pick wizards.

Tactics:

• Pair junior developers with senior Pick talent
• Focus on interoperability: teach them how to use APIs to communicate with Pick
• Introduce tools that abstract the legacy complexity

Why It Works: With the right tools and mentorship, junior developers can keep the lights on—and contribute to modernization.

3. Create a Modernization Roadmap

Modernization doesn’t have to mean “rip and replace.” Start with a roadmap: stabilize the present, prepare for the future.

Tactics:

• Inventory your Pick applications and rate by business criticality and complexity
• Identify integration points with modern systems (ERP, CRM, analytics)
• Choose pilot apps that are safe to refactor or rebuild
• Migrate data dictionaries and business logic in phases

Why It Works: You protect operations while creating options. Hybrid architectures (modern UI, legacy logic) buy you time and reduce disruption.

4. Partner with Experts Who Know Pick

There’s a small but capable community of firms specializing in Pick modernization and migration. Leverage them.

Tactics:

• Bring in partners who understand Pick and modern architecture (e.g., Node.js, MongoDB)
• Choose firms that extract and transform—not just rewrite
• Validate credentials: this isn’t for generalist developers

Why It Works: You benefit from experience and proven playbooks. Knowledge transfer becomes lasting, structured, and explainable.

What Happens If You Don’t Act?

Case Study: A regional distributor lost $2.5 million in stalled orders when their last Pick programmer retired. A closing routine bug went unresolved for two weeks. Emergency consultants cost another $200,000.

This is avoidable.

The cost of inaction rises:

• Recruitment delays grow
• Consultants become more expensive
• Talent leaves without training others
• Every integration becomes harder

The MYRA Advantage: How AI Can Help

At BinaryStar Systems, we’ve built MYRA, an AI-powered system to intelligently modernize Pick applications.

MYRA Works in Three Phases:

1. Ingest legacy Pick code and business logic
2. Disentangle UI, business rules, and data logic
3. Modernize into structured, API-ready code (Node.js + MongoDB)

Key Features:

• Preserves business logic fidelity
• Automates dictionary translation
• Generates pilot-ready modules
• Offers full audit trail and explainability

MYRA accelerates knowledge transfer and reduces your dependency on tribal knowledge.

How HR Can Lead the Change

This is not just a tech issue. HR plays a key role in orchestrating the transition:

Frame it as workforce sustainability, not just staffing.

A Transitional Architecture: The Safe Middle Ground

You don’t need to refactor everything overnight. A hybrid solution offers a low-risk path:

• Wrap legacy logic in APIs using StarView or Nucleus
• Expose data through MongoDB replicas
• Build new UIs using React or modern tools

This enables incremental transformation—without downtime.

Strategic Imperatives for the C-Suite