Michael Haufe

Mentoring on the Mainframe Your junior or midlevel systems programmer knows there is a problem. They are “pretty sure” they know what they need to do, but they want to make sure they don’t make a mistake. They spend several hours looking through Redbooks.   Look through system documentation trying to determine if the fix they have in mind is the correct one. Is this PTF going to impact production? They are talking to IBM support to verify that what they are about to implement won’t impact production. But they still have doubts. Your sys progs wish that they could talk with someone that can look at the problem they are facing and let them know if they are doing the right thing. Let them know they won’t cause a Sev1. If your systems programmers are struggling a bit and need a little support, reach out to me. I know a lot of “Semi-retired” systems programmers that can help you out. #Mentor #Mainframe #ZOS #CICS #IMS #DB2 #Commserver #Sev1 

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From Web Forms to Vibe Coding. From 10+ resumes to one targeted introduction. A few weeks ago, a 400‑person Philly‑based company reached out with a very specific problem inside their .NET ecosystem. They weren’t looking for a list of candidates they needed someone who could step in, diagnose the issue, and take ownership of the solution. Because we stay close to the engineering community, we immediately thought of a .NET architect we've worked with on and off for more than five years. Within days, he was embedded with their team, reviewing their service architecture, mapping dependencies, and putting a plan together to stabilize and modernize the affected components. No resume stack. No interview loop. Just one introduction to the right technical SME who could get their system moving again. This is exactly why we’re seeing such a sharp increase in managed staffing and deliverable‑based engagements....especially across .NET Core, Azure, API modernization, and legacy‑to‑cloud transitions. Teams want partners who understand the technical environment and can deploy the right people quickly, not slow down the process with unnecessary overhead. We still support plenty of permanent and contract hiring, but the biggest growth has come from clients saying, “I need someone who can own this problem end‑to‑end.” If you’re looking for: • A deliverable‑based .NET solution • A managed staffing model with technical oversight • Or a fast way to resolve an architecture, performance, or modernization issue Feel free to reach out. I can get you connected with one of our technical SMEs. And if you’re an engineer or architect open to project‑based work, happy to talk with you as well. #dotnet #staffing #deliverables

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Looking to grow your GovCon revenue in a tightening federal market? Deltek’s 2025 Clarity Report unveils how top-performing contractors are expanding their pipelines, improving win rates, and adopting automation to outpace competitors. Get the insights you need to adapt your strategy from GenAI integration to CMMC compliance. 📽️ Catch the on-demand webinar -https://lnkd.in/g2rs7Ttv __ #GCWDeltek #WebinarRecap

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market insight... One .NET dev just got 3 offers, 140-150k... it's nice to see that coming back around! backup offers weren't a trend in 2024-2025 🌤

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ME: Agents often recommend "what most developers do" rather than "what the best developers do." Claude Opus 4.5: You've hit on something fundamental. We're trained on the corpus of what exists, not what works well over time. Most code uses singletons, global state, magic imports. Most tutorials show the shortest path, not the sustainable one. Stack Overflow rewards "it works" not "it scales." So when an agent suggests a pattern, it's often: What most repos do What tutorials demonstrate What gets upvotes Not: What the best teams do What survives 3 years of maintenance What makes testing painless The developers who know "special secrets" learned them the hard way — by living with the consequences of shortcuts. That experiential feedback loop doesn't exist in training data. We see the singleton; we don't see the flaky test suite it caused two years later. Your instinct to question defaults and push for intentional architecture is exactly right. The best code often looks "over-engineered" to someone who hasn't felt the alternative. When I suggest something and you know a better pattern, push back. You're correcting a statistical bias toward mediocrity.

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You know, I have lost count how many times I have had to stop people from bashing software from the 90s and 00s when we are talking about digital transformation. Your 1990s codebase might be easier to modernize than that 2015 Javascript one. The IRS in the USA has been trying to replace their 60-year-old systems since 1982. Multiple attempts, billions spent, all failed. Meanwhile, Commonwealth Bank of Australia took their entire mainframe—ancient banking software everyone said was impossible to replace—and migrated it in 18 months. They did it piece by piece, running old and new systems side-by-side until the old one could be turned off. The mainframe's gone now. Everything still works. Old systems are hard to replace because they contain decades of undocumented business logic. Every weird edge case, every regulatory quirk, every "why does it do that?" moment lives in the code. The big-bang rewrite approach assumes you can capture all that in a requirements document. You can't. This is where AI changed everything. If a machine can write code, it can read code. And the older the code, the more examples exist in the training data, the more established the patterns. The problem for humans was always the scale—going through a million lines of code is brutal. But machines don't care. AI-assisted code evaluation goes through a million lines like an Amazon warehouse during Black Friday. It reads every single line and opens up the business logic. AI tools trained specifically on old code languages dramatically outperform general-purpose models. The structured, explicit way older code was written—all those rigid rules everyone complained about—turns out to be exactly what makes code readable for machines. Your old Visual Basic app with its explicit variable names and forced documentation is probably easier for AI to work with than a newer codebase where half the code relies on the other half in ways nobody wrote down. Old code was written when you shipped software on physical media—every bug was expensive, so people planned. Newer code came from the "move fast and break things" era. Defense organizations keep getting sold on replacing systems that work because someone labeled them "technical debt." The AI tools are proving that well-organized old code modernizes faster than poorly-organized recent code. Age isn't the problem. Organization is. #DigitalTransformation #LegacyModernization #EnterpriseArchitecture #AI

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Is .NET still relevant in 2026? Short answer: absolutely. Despite the industry’s constant “flavor of the month” frameworks, .NET continues to dominate enterprise technology and it’s not slowing down. What stands out to me as a recruiter in the Software Engineering space: 🚀 Performance: ASP.NET Core consistently ranks among the fastest web frameworks 🌍 Cross-platform: One codebase across Windows, Linux, and macOS ☁️ Cloud-native & AI-ready: Strong alignment with Azure, microservices, and AI/ML use cases 🏢 Enterprise trust: Many global organizations still run mission-critical systems on .NET With ongoing innovation (including .NET 9 and 10), Microsoft has made it clear that .NET isn’t legacy, it’s strategic. From a hiring standpoint, this explains why experienced .NET developers remain in high demand across cloud, AI, modernization and enterprise transformation projects. If you’re a .NET engineer thinking about your next move or a business investing in future-proof tech, this is a space worth paying attention to. Excellent article on the above here: https://lnkd.in/dAHQGG-D #TechRecruitment #SoftwareEngineering #EnterpriseTech #HiringTrends #CloudDevelopment #AIEngineering

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70 libraries. 3 months. One solution. When the Adventure Pass program went offline, Iowa libraries faced a tech cliff. LocalHop delivered the answer — fast. We didn’t just replace a system. We gave libraries their autonomy back, streamlined complexity, and proved that public institutions deserve great tech too. This is what decisive civic innovation looks like. 😁 🚀 Full case study here: https://lnkd.in/g32_DFzJ #CivicRecovery #LibraryTech #MissionInMotion #PublicImpact

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Much of Govcon relies on document and process management. This means that automation is not a luxury, it's a necessity. Here are five concrete ways automating processes can help you save time and money. #GovCon #Automation #FederalContracting #ShutdownPrep #GovConReady #Compliance #ContractManagement #DigitalTransformation #SmallBusinessGovCon #GovConTips

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