The Absurdist's Guide to Deprecation

Camus argued that the absurd hero finds dignity not in permanence but in the quality of engagement with temporary creation. In software engineering, where the average microservice lifespan is 3.2 years (2024 Thoughtworks Technology Radar), every system is a deprecation waiting to happen. The absurdist framework transforms this reality from a source of despair into a source of freedom.

Why does deprecation feel like failure?

Deprecation feels like failure because engineering culture implicitly promises permanence: we call systems “infrastructure” and “platforms,” words that evoke foundations meant to last forever.

I deprecated my first major system in 2020. A data pipeline I had designed over 4 months, built over 6, and operated for 18. The replacement was faster, cheaper, and built on a cloud service that did not exist when I started the original design. The deprecation ticket was 3 sentences long. The commit that removed 14,000 lines of my code was merged without ceremony.

I felt it physically. A tightness in the chest. A sense that the 10 months I spent building and operating the system had been, in some fundamental way, wasted. The feeling was irrational. I knew the system had processed 2.3 billion records successfully during its operational life. But knowing it was irrational did not make it go away.

What would Camus say about deprecated systems?

Camus would say that attaching meaning to the permanence of your creation is the error, and that the 2.3 billion records processed were meaningful during every second of their processing, regardless of what comes after.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes a universe that is indifferent to our desire for lasting meaning. The rock rolls back down. The pipeline gets deprecated. The feature gets sunset. The absurdist response is not despair. It is the refusal to let impermanence diminish the value of the work itself. The 2.3 billion records were processed correctly. The system operated with 99.97% uptime. Those facts do not become less true because the system no longer exists.

Camus distinguished between the “absurd man” who gives up and the “absurd hero” who continues. The absurd hero does not seek permanence. The absurd hero seeks quality. The dignity of the work is in the doing, not the lasting.

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

I have deprecated 7 systems in my career. Each one taught me more about architecture than the 3 systems I am currently maintaining. The deprecation reveals the design decisions that aged well and the ones that did not. It reveals the requirements that were stable and the ones that were projections. Every deprecated system is a postmortem for an entire design philosophy. The absurdist does not mourn the deprecated system. The absurdist studies it, learns from it, and walks back down the hill to build the next one. The question that remains unanswered: if we knew from the start that every system would be deprecated, would we build them differently, or is the illusion of permanence what gives us the courage to begin?