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In Praise of the Delete Key
And why getting rid of things is much harder than creating them
Sometimes, I feel like I’ve spent my whole career deleting things. I decommission old systems, remove redundant code, and turn off unsupported servers. Anyone who has worked in IT will know that making a new system is hard, but decommissioning the old one is even harder. Getting rid of old things is often called the most difficult challenge in software development.
The problem is that everything is connected. You never simply identify an old system and turn it off. You discover that new, critical systems depend on old, redundant ones. The strategic application you just rolled out will be making an API call to a single server running classic ASP under Dave’s desk. Every time you remove a component, something somewhere breaks. To delete a page on one website is to create a dead link on another.
Even fixing things that patently aren’t working causes issues. I remember once pushing an update that sorted lists in alphabetical order. “You need to roll back the latest update,” someone demanded, “it’s broken our screenscraper.” Someone had built atop our bug. “Every change breaks someone’s workflow,” XKCD jokes in a comic about fixing a bug causing computers to overheat. I laugh at this, but also, I wince. It feels too real.
Perhaps this is a universal law even beyond computers. Getting rid of things is harder than creating them in the first place. Think how much harder it was for Twitter to disable Donald Trump’s Twitter account than for him to set it up. How much more work it is to dispel QAnon conspiracies than to come up with them. All it took was for someone to look at a 5G mast and say, “Hey, maybe that thing caused it all,” and we were off on another roller coaster of delusion. There is Brandolini’s law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it. And the old line about lies traveling around the world before the truth even puts its boots on. “I’m just asking questions,” people say when promoting conspiracy theories. They’re never just asking questions.
A few years ago, a colleague of mine ran a project to update all the old Windows 2000 servers our company was still running. There were, he told me, only 20 left. Six…
