Deleting code is the single most satisfying action I get to take part in as a developer. The thing is, I can get pretty happy about writing a graceful function.

Deleting code is the single most satisfying action I get to take part in as a developer. The thing is, I can get pretty happy about writing a graceful function.. but all code is liability, and test cases. There's no act in software development more elegantly productive that deleting code you don't need. Almost got me in trouble once, true story. I had a VP who asked another senior dev type to round up LOC stats in our product for the past month (typical ridiculous bullshit). The dev dutifully whipped together a tool that was the equivalent of counting LOC changes from SVN commits. Deleted lines counted negatively :) Even though I was the most senior coder on the team, and at the time certainly impacting the most change in the source tree, I was riding somewhere close to zero according to his tool and had some 'splaining to do. Most large software projects that I've been a part of hit a phase somewhere between year two and three where I think they deserve a net code loss for quite a while. There's just so much well-intentioned bullshit that gets piled on in the first year or two of a project, and often doesn't get re-evaluated.. or someone on the team is operating under the delusional belief that someday that code will serve the project well in it's current, half-assed, un-tested form.