In six months... Why they can't do this tomorrow is a mystery to me, it is not like they have to do something extra, they just have to stop being dishonest.
Oh, come on now, this is just stupid. Do you think their website code writes itself? 6 month is very much a reasonable deadline. In fact, it's the tightest I can realistically imagine for a platform with a considerable history and god knows how many lines of code to change its core functionality all their marketing strategy revolves around.
Why can't this just be removed from the front end immediately? The next six months can be used for removing it from the back end or keeping it there and just serving it up to those customers outside of the EU.
Adding the following to your uBlock filter will do most of this and it takes you all of 30 seconds. It would take a while longer to update their SASS, recompile the CSS, test and get into production but I'd have thought a few weeks should be sufficient.
I can never tell with HN what is meant as sarcasm and what isn't, but somewhere in their code there is a bunch of stuff that reads 'do tricks' and you can just comment that bit out and everything else should continue to work. That they can sell ignorant politicians on that is one thing but here we really should know better.
Put another way: if they were given an opportunity to do the opposite it would be done in a day or two.
This is nonsense. It sounds like you never really worked on any large scale project with at least some amount of legacy code. I have experience with travel industry, and I can tell with absolute certainty that there exist many projects (much younger than booking.com, by the way), where disabling something like that "in a day or two" is downright physically impossible. Marketing and strategical issues aside, there wouldn't be a single person who could apply necessary changes in a day or two for any amount of money. It might sound crazy for an outsider, but that's just the way it is.
> This is nonsense. It sounds like you never really worked on any large scale project with at least some amount of legacy code.
Well, what you read into my writing is entirely your problem, but let's just say that you are far off the mark and it is precisely because I have couple of decades in IT behind me that I know that six months to stop doing something at this level is ridiculous.
> I have experience with travel industry, and I can tell with absolute certainty that there exist many projects (much younger than booking.com, by the way), where disabling something like that "in a day or two" is downright physically impossible.
I would hope that the level of competence at booking.com would be a little higher than that.
> Marketing and strategical issues aside, there wouldn't be a single person who could apply necessary changes in a day or two for any amount of money.
I'd be happy to give it a shot.
> It might sound crazy for an outsider, but that's just the way it is.
Or so you say. But the fact is that all software ever written did stuff because we tell it to and that disabling some bit of code is mostly matter of locating it. Writing new functionality can be very hard and might take a long time. But disabling something as simple as 'output ridiculous sentences that pressure our users into buying' should not be harder than to locate it and disabling it. If that has unintended side effects at the level that you are suggesting then booking.com has other problems.
Finally, I'm sure that if they wanted to make quick work of it they could disable that bit in the CSS for their website and make it pretty behind the scenes at their leisure. Anything that can be displayed can be hidden.
You are half right. Making those behaviors completely disappear from the codebase? That might be a challenge. Making them not show for the customers , ever ? That's a matter of adding a few display: none rules to the SASS, recompiling it and doing a quickfix release. At our company this would involve a frontend developer, someone who can do a release (not unlikely: me :) ) and someone from QA. If the law were on our tails, I would estimate less than a day to get this done even during Christmas holidays. I don't think we ever played the playbook in PagerDuty which pages frontend but we could. Even my phone meows rarely, phew! (PagerDuty has many hilarious sounds, my choice is the meow sound thus we practice meow driven development: I don't like my phone to meow desperately.)
