[igsomething]

In my experience, "little software shops" are about maintaining "living fossile" systems. They survive by signing contracts with non-tech companies (supermarkets, healthcare, etc.) to develop a system and offer support, but never update it. There is no need to update or improve anything since there is no competition. The customer would have to sign a contract with another software shop, and non-tech companies are highly risk-averse, as long as it gets the job done they keep paying.

It gets frustrating most of the times since you'll be working with old and unsupported tools, and you cannot update them. I am talking Postgres 8, AngularJS, ASP.NET, etc.