If you follow the prescribed procedure and involve all required management, it stops being a beginner's mistake; and given reasonable rollback provisions it stops being a mistake at all because if nobody knows what the thing is it cannot be very important, and a removal attempt is the most effective and cost efficient way to find out whether the ting can be removed.

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Retric 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> a removal attempt is the most effective and cost efficient way to find out whether the ting can be removed

Cost efficient for your team’s budget sure, but a 1% chance of a 10+ million dollar issue is worth significant effort. That’s the thing with enterprise systems the scale of minor blips can justify quite a bit. If 1 person operating for 3 months could figure out what something is doing there’s scales where that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Enterprise covers a while range of situations there’s a lot more billion dollar orgs than trillion dollar orgs so your mileage may very.

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HelloNurse an hour ago | parent [-]

If there is a risk of a 10+ million dollar issue there is also some manager whose job is to overreact when they hear the announcement that someone wants to eliminate thing X, because they know that thing X is a useful part of the systems they are responsible for.

In a reasonable organization only very minor systems can be undocumented enough to fall through the cracks.

	▲	Retric 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In an ideal world sure, but knowledge gets lost every time someone randomly quits, dies, retires etc. Stuff that’s been working fine for years is easy for a team to forget about.

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amalcon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have had several things over the course of my career that:

1) I was (temporarily) the only one still at the company who knew why it was there

2) I only knew myself because I had reverse engineered it, because the person who put it there had left the company

Now, some of those things had indeed become unnecessary over time (and thus were removed). Some of them, however, have been important (and thus were documented). In aggregate, it's been well worth the effort to do that reverse engineering to classify things properly.

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chrisweekly 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, maybe. See Chesterson's Fence^1

[1] https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/