Ask HN: Do companies need reverse engineering of legacy software?
Hi,
I have been playing with disassemblers/decompilers like IDA and ghidra in the past years and I have noticed that I have become quite good in reverse engineering old software from the 80s and early 90s on various platforms. By reverse engineering, I mean turning binaries into readable and maintainable source code in a high-level language, even if they use complex datastructures or perform complex computations (i.e. not just some 8-bit games).
Is that a skill still sought after in the industry? Or have all companies moved on (apart from some retro-computing enthusiast), rewritten their old programs and firmware for which they couldn't find the source code anymore, and I am twenty years too late?
Note that I am not looking for RE in cybersecurity (malware analysis etc.). That's something I am already doing occasionally, sometimes even for money :)
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