In my experience, it is very difficult to get a commitment for the effort to remove deadcode.
The problem is essentially invisible to everyone except maybe the dev who is dealing with a high noise-to-signal ratio as a result.
If it was a woodworking shop instead of a code repository, management would constantly see what a mess the shop is due to never being cleaned up properly.
They would never tolerate this because of the way it looks. The woodshop looks sloppy, half-assed and almost sure to be an inefficient place to do work, if it does not get cleaned up on a regular basis.
Because they cannot see deadcode in the repository in a similar manner, it is especially challenging to get them to care.
This might not add much to the discussion, since the post is not really about dead code removal, but your woodworking shop analogy reminds me of the bakery analogy at the beginninf of this old post by Joel Spolsky:
You just delete it on the fly as you come across it, since it lives on in the version control system anyway. If your workplace doesn't have version control, leave.
Comments
In my experience, it is very difficult to get a commitment for the effort to remove deadcode.
The problem is essentially invisible to everyone except maybe the dev who is dealing with a high noise-to-signal ratio as a result.
If it was a woodworking shop instead of a code repository, management would constantly see what a mess the shop is due to never being cleaned up properly.
They would never tolerate this because of the way it looks. The woodshop looks sloppy, half-assed and almost sure to be an inefficient place to do work, if it does not get cleaned up on a regular basis.
Because they cannot see deadcode in the repository in a similar manner, it is especially challenging to get them to care.
This might not add much to the discussion, since the post is not really about dead code removal, but your woodworking shop analogy reminds me of the bakery analogy at the beginninf of this old post by Joel Spolsky:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...
You just delete it on the fly as you come across it, since it lives on in the version control system anyway. If your workplace doesn't have version control, leave.