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.)
