1 in 4 Enterprises Not Confident They Can Retain the Engineering Talent to Keep Their Systems Running

New research from Storyblok exposes a legacy talent crisis already taking hold across enterprise technology

LONDON, June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- New research from Storyblok finds that 1 in 4 organisations are not confident they can attract and retain the engineering talent needed to maintain their current systems over the next five years. A further 50% say they are only "somewhat confident."

For organisations running critical infrastructure on legacy systems, the consequences of this are operational: systems that cannot be maintained, security debt that cannot be managed, and modernisation programmes that cannot be properly resourced.

The Enterprise Developer Shift 2026 surveyed 250 developers, security engineers and platform professionals and found a talent crisis that those closest to it already expect to get worse. 69% of respondents expect the talent gap between legacy and modern architecture expertise to grow over the next two to three years. Only 6% expect it to shrink.

This is playing out in an already challenging talent market, with 41% of respondents reporting some level of hiring difficulty over the past 12 months. Likewise, four in ten technical professionals (40.63%) have either left a role or seriously considered leaving because the stack felt outdated or was holding back their growth.

The research also reveals how deeply a developer's tech environment shapes their day-to-day work. More than half of respondents (58%) spend at least 30% of their working week on maintenance rather than building. In primarily legacy environments, that number climbs to 85%. In modern stack organisations, it drops to 51%.

"These numbers shouldn't surprise anyone who's been paying attention, but they should concern them. Engineers have been telling us for years that the stack matters, and now we're seeing what happens when organisations don't listen. The talent is moving on, and it's not coming back," says Sebastian Gierlinger, VP of AI and IT at Storyblok.

"There's a version of this story where the maintenance burden is just an efficiency problem. But when your engineers are spending the majority of their week keeping existing systems running, they're not building new skills, they're not building new products, and eventually they're not staying. This is where it is becoming a business problem," adds Gierlinger.

The full findings of the report are available to download here.

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