In my experience, it is very difficult to get a commitment for the effort to remove deadcode. The problem is essentially invisible to everyone except maybe the

In my experience, it is very difficult to get a commitment for the effort to remove deadcode. The problem is essentially invisible to everyone except maybe the dev who is dealing with a high noise-to-signal ratio as a result. If it was a woodworking shop instead of a code repository, management would constantly see what a mess the shop is due to never being cleaned up properly. They would never tolerate this because of the way it looks. The woodshop looks sloppy, half-assed and almost sure to be an inefficient place to do work, if it does not get cleaned up on a regular basis. Because they cannot see deadcode in the repository in a similar manner, it is especially challenging to get them to care.