The Absurdity of Optimizing Deprecated Systems

What makes optimizing a doomed system absurd?

The absurdity lies in the gap between the human need for permanence and the reality of deprecation. You pour intelligence, care, and craft into a system that will, with certainty, be turned off. Camus would recognize this immediately.

I spent 4 months optimizing a data pipeline that processed 2.3 million records daily. I reduced its processing time from 47 minutes to 11 minutes. I was proud of that work. Six weeks after completion, the team lead announced the entire platform was being migrated to a new architecture. My pipeline would be decommissioned within the quarter.

The rational response would have been anger. Or regret. What I felt instead was something closer to recognition. I had known the migration was likely when I started the optimization. I did the work anyway. Not because I believed the pipeline would last, but because the work itself, the craft of making something faster, cleaner, more elegant, was its own justification.

How did Camus resolve the problem of absurdity?

He did not resolve it. He refused to resolve it. Camus argued that the absurd hero (Sisyphus pushing his boulder) finds meaning not in the outcome (the boulder always rolls back) but in the act of pushing. The deprecated system is the boulder. The engineer is Sisyphus. And we must imagine them content.

Camus offered three possible responses to absurdity: physical suicide (ending the confrontation), philosophical suicide (denying the absurdity through faith or ideology), or revolt (living within the absurdity without resolution). In engineering terms: you can quit, you can pretend your systems will last forever, or you can do the work knowing it will not last and finding meaning in the doing.

I have seen all three responses in engineering teams. The engineer who burns out and leaves the industry: that is a form of exit from the absurd. The architect who builds “future-proof” systems and insists this one will be different: that is philosophical suicide, the denial that deprecation is inevitable. And the engineer who writes clean, careful code for a system scheduled for decommission next year: that is Camus’s revolt. As I wrote in Camus, Sisyphus, and the CI/CD pipeline, the pipeline is always temporary. The discipline of building it well is not.

Where does meaning come from in temporary work?

Meaning comes from craft, from the relationships formed in building, and from the knowledge that transfers to the next system. The system is temporary. The engineer who built it is not.

I carried 3 specific insights from that deprecated pipeline into the next system I built. The optimization patterns I developed saved the new team approximately 160 hours of design work. The monitoring approach I had prototyped became the template for the new platform’s observability layer. Nothing was wasted, not because the system survived, but because the knowledge survived.

This is the Stoic complement to Camus’s absurdism. Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Do every act of your life as though it were your last.” Not because each act has permanent consequences, but because the quality of the act is the only thing within your control. The absurdist’s guide to deprecation is not nihilism. It is freedom. When you accept that the system will die, you stop building for posterity and start building for excellence.

What does this mean for how we value engineering work?

It means we should stop measuring engineering value by system longevity and start measuring it by craft quality, knowledge transfer, and the growth of the people who did the work.

Organizations reward permanence. The system that runs for 10 years is celebrated. The system that was beautifully built but replaced in 18 months is forgotten. This valuation is absurd in Camus’s sense: it imposes a criterion (permanence) that almost no system can satisfy. If the average system lives 6.2 years, then optimizing for permanence means optimizing for a standard that 50% of systems will not meet.

A better valuation: did the engineer learn something transferable? Did the code teach the next team something useful? Did the architecture decisions, documented in architecture decision records, survive the system they described? These are the metrics of meaning in temporary work.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Every system you build will be deprecated. This is not a depressing statement. It is a liberating one. When the permanence of the product is no longer the source of meaning, the quality of the process becomes everything. The 11-minute pipeline I built lasted 3 months. The discipline it taught me has lasted years. The boulder rolls back. You walk down the hill. You push it again. And if you push it with precision, with care, with the full attention that craft demands, then the pushing is the meaning. It was always the meaning.