Alright, let’s talk about that whole “gold scissors” thing. It feels like ages ago now, but I remember it pretty clearly because, well, it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing.
It started off simple enough. My manager came over, you know how they do, all cheerful. Said he had a quick little job for me. We needed to trim down some old, unused features from one of our legacy systems. He actually called it the “gold scissors” task. Said we’d just snip, snip, snip, clean and easy. Like using fancy scissors to cut a ribbon. Sounded great, right? Famous last words.
So, I jumped into it. First step, figure out exactly what code needed to go. I spent a day or two mapping out the sections, checking what was still being called, what wasn’t. Seemed pretty obvious which parts were dead weight. I listed them all out.
- Identified the target modules.
- Checked for any obvious dependencies – didn’t find many at first glance.
- Did some basic tests on a dev environment to see if anything screamed immediately. It didn’t.
Looked okay. So I pulled the codebase onto my machine, branched it like you’re supposed to, and started carefully cutting out the old bits. Piece by piece. Commenting out first, then removing. Running tests after each major removal.
Then things got messy. Really messy. I removed this one ancient reporting feature, something nobody had supposedly used in years. Suddenly, the user profile page started throwing errors. Like, completely unrelated parts of the system just decided to die. How? Why? Took me almost a week, digging through layers and layers of old code, to find the connection. Turns out some developer, probably before I even joined the company, had wired the reporting module into the user session validation logic. Don’t ask me why. There were zero comments, zero documentation. Just pure, tangled spaghetti code.
I tried to get some help. Talked to one of the senior guys. He just kinda laughed and said, “Ah yeah, classic Project X codebase. Good luck with that.” Super helpful. Another person suggested just patching it, basically adding more spaghetti to hide the existing spaghetti. Management, meanwhile, kept asking for status updates, wondering why the “quick snip” was taking so long. It felt like I was being asked to perform delicate surgery with rusty garden shears.
In the end, the whole “gold scissors” idea went out the window. We couldn’t cleanly cut out everything we wanted to without rewriting half the system, which nobody had the budget or time for. So, what did I do? I ended up disabling most of the targeted code instead of removing it entirely. Left big, angry comments everywhere explaining the situation, warning future developers not to touch it unless they absolutely had to. We marked the task as ‘complete’, but it wasn’t the clean cut anyone hoped for. It’s just… less visible now. Still lurking there. That’s the reality of working with old systems sometimes, I guess. Not so golden after all.
