I've been inside enough legacy systems to know what they all have in common. It's not the code.

The systems are all different. FoxPro. AS/400. COBOL. Access. RPG. VB6. Different architectures. Different eras. Different degrees of accumulated complexity.

But three things are almost always the same.

The business logic is more sophisticated than it looks. What appears to be a simple database is encoding years of decisions. Pricing exceptions. Customer-specific rules. Regulatory responses. The kind of logic that never made it into a specification - it was just how things worked.

The data is messier than expected. Not because anyone was careless. Because data accumulates history. Companies absorbed through acquisition. Products that changed names three times. Every migration starts with a data archaeology phase. Without exception.

The people are more anxious than they let on. Not about the technology. About the risk of change. About whether the new system will do what the old one did. About being responsible if something goes wrong.

That anxiety is legitimate. It deserves to be taken seriously.

I've walked into these conversations with the Legacymigrations team enough times to know: the technical work is usually the easier part. The harder part is the conversation - understanding what someone has built over 20 years and making sure they feel confident it won't be lost.