There are weeks when the news feels like a reminder that time moves faster than we would like and last week was one of them. Globally, headlines shared the deaths of two extraordinary creative figures: Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, both 80.

Parton became one of the most recognizable figures in music and entertainment while building a business empire and an extraordinary philanthropic legacy. Curry became an international cultural icon through The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and then spent decades championing for the LGBTQ+ community while navigating a career in theatre, film, television, music and voice acting.

Both were iconic champions of diversity and pushing the boundaries of societal norms. They are proof that some of our most powerful leaders are gentle and compassionate humanitarians who also made walking on six-inch platform stilettos look easy.

Their deaths are sad, but their careers offer something constructive for the technology industry to think about.

How do we stay relevant when the world around us keeps changing?

This question applies to software systems, to technology organizations and perhaps most importantly, it applies to the humans building and maintaining them.

Technology Has Legacy Systems. People Have Institutional Knowledge.

The technology industry spends a lot of time worrying about legacy software.

And for good reason.

Legacy applications can become difficult to maintain, expensive to modify and increasingly dependent on technologies that fewer people know well.

But there is another form of legacy that organizations often overlook: institutional knowledge.

A senior developer may know why a particular database table was designed in a seemingly bizarre way. An architect may remember the reason an application was split into three services. A systems administrator may know which seemingly unrelated server is responsible for keeping an ancient integration alive. A business analyst may be the only person who understands why a particular workflow exists in the first place.

This knowledge is incredibly valuable but, it is also incredibly vulnerable.

When an experienced technology professional retires, changes careers or leaves an organization, the company may discover that years of operational knowledge were never documented.

The software remains while the knowledge disappears.

Why Succession Planning Belongs in IT

Succession planning is sometimes treated as an HR exercise, but in technology it should also be treated as risk management.

Consider a critical legacy application that only one senior developer understands.

What happens when that developer retires?

The organization may hire someone to replace them. But, hiring someone who understands the technology is not necessarily the same as hiring someone who understands the history of the application, the business rules embedded within it and the reasons behind its architecture.

This is one reason legacy software modernization should include more than a technology assessment.

It should include a knowledge assessment:

• Who understands the system?
• Where is the documentation?
• Which processes depend on individual knowledge?
• Which integrations are effectively dependent on one person’s memory?
• What would happen if that person were unavailable tomorrow?

These are all uncomfortable questions. They are also considerably cheaper to answer before there is an emergency.

Dolly Didn’t Become Relevant by Staying the Same

Parton’s career is a nearly perfect example of reinvention.

She became successful as a songwriter and performer, then expanded into film and television, business, tourism and philanthropy.

Reuters reports that she wrote approximately 3,000 songs, sold more than 100 million albums and built a business empire that included a major ownership stake in Dollywood. It also highlights her decision to retain rights to her music catalogue, allowing work created earlier in her career to continue generating value.

There is a useful technology lesson hiding in her career.

Don’t abandon the things that made you successful. Build on them.

A technology professional’s existing knowledge is an asset.

The goal isn’t to become a completely different professional every time technology changes. The goal is to add new capabilities to an existing foundation.

That’s how careers remain resilient.

Adaptation Isn’t Always Optional: Lessons from Tim

Curry’s later career offers a different but equally important lesson.

After suffering a stroke in 2013, Curry’s mobility was significantly affected. Yet he remained connected to his craft through voice work, cameo appearances and other projects. Reuters reports that he returned to the big screen in 2024 in the horror film Stream.

His career didn’t continue exactly as it had before, it evolved. The distinction matters.

We sometimes talk about career reinvention as if it is a grand strategic choice.

Sometimes it is, but sometimes circumstances force it.

Technology professionals know this feeling well:

• A programming language loses popularity.
• A platform gets retired.
• A company changes direction.
• A product disappears.
• A skill that was highly valued five years ago becomes less important.

The response cannot always be ‘wait for the industry to come back.’

It’s often an indicator that it is time to learn something adjacent.

The good news is that technology experience is incredibly transferable.

Your Legacy Should Be More Than Code

There is another important lesson here for senior and mid career technology professionals.

Your legacy should not simply be the software you built.

It should also be the people you helped build:

• Did you document the system?
• Did you mentor someone?
• Did you explain why something worked the way it did?
• Did you make it easier for the next developer to maintain your code?
• Did you challenge the organization when a better solution was available?
• Did you help someone younger become confident enough to take over?

These activities may not appear on a project status report, but, ultimately, they may be some of the most valuable things you accomplish.

Parton’s philanthropic legacy provides an excellent illustration of this principle. Her Imagination Library, launched in 1995, has distributed more than 304 million free books to children around the world. You read that right, 304 million free books. Curry, also a voracious reader created the Tim Curry Endowment for Youth Writing Programs Fund, which helps foster the growth and development of young writers,

Regardless of the industry you are in there is something powerful about building something that continues to create value after the original creator has stepped away.

Technology professionals can do this, too.

Third-Party Software Development Can Help Bridge the Gap

Organizations facing a technology succession problem do not necessarily have to choose between hiring a replacement immediately or hedging bets on nothing breaking.

Experienced software development partners can provide additional capacity while knowledge is being transferred.

Services often include:

• Legacy application assessment
• Software modernization planning
• Software audits
• Technical documentation
• Architecture reviews
• Knowledge transfer
• Application maintenance
• Staff augmentation
• QA and testing
• Middleware and integration development
• Custom software development
• On-call technical support

The goal isn’t to replace internal expertise, it’s to protect and extend it.

A third-party team can work alongside senior employees while they transfer institutional knowledge to the next generation. The right partner can also provide additional technical capacity if internal teams are stretched too thin to modernize systems while keeping the business running.

This approach can be particularly useful when an organization has a retiring senior technology resource who holds years of undocumented institutional knowledge.

A structured transition can capture that knowledge while there is still time.

This might include documenting architecture, identifying critical dependencies, reviewing source code, mapping integrations, creating runbooks and pairing experienced specialists with the people who will eventually take over.

I think we can all agree, it is much easier to transfer knowledge when the expert is sitting beside you than when their name has already disappeared from the company directory.

The Technology Industry Doesn’t Need More People Who Know Everything

It needs more people who are willing to keep learning.

Nobody can know everything anymore; technology is changing too quickly for this to even be reasonable.

The most successful technology professional of the future isn’t necessarily the person who can memorize the most frameworks.

It is the person who knows how to:

• Learn.
• Investigate.
• Ask better questions.
• Understand the business problem.
• Collaborate with specialists.
• Adapt when the first solution doesn’t work.
• And how to take decades of experience and apply it to a completely different technological environment.

Experience only remains valuable when it continues to evolve.

Be a Good Human and Leave Something Behind

The deaths of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry are reminders that careers eventually become legacies.

For the tech industry, their passing should prompt some uncomfortable but useful questions:

• What happens to systems someone understands when they leave?
• Who knows what that someone knows?
• Is existing documentation good enough for someone else to take over?
• Has the knowledge that exists in only their head been shared with anyone?
• Are the mid career team members still learning?
• Is mentoring part of the fabric of your team?

And perhaps the most important question for your team and your company:

What do you want to be remembered for?

Maybe it’s a brilliant application.

Maybe it’s an architecture that lasted 20 years.

Maybe it’s a modernization project that saved a company millions.

Maybe it’s the technical standard you established.

Or maybe it’s the five developers you mentored who went on to build things you never imagined.

The beauty of a career in technology is that you don’t have to remain the same person you were when you started. You can keep adapting, keep learning, keep contributing, keep reinventing, and eventually, leave the technology, knowledge and people around you a little better than you found them.

The goal of a long career isn’t to remain unchanged while the world changes around you , the goal is to keep changing in ways that make your experience more valuable, not less.

And perhaps it’s the real wake-up call for the tech industry.