[bogdan-lab]

Yes, I completely agree. The story sounds like fairytale: migration was announced to happen in 3 months and in 4 months it was done by removing old API.

Where are all those clients, who are happy with current API performance and do not want to spend their money on making API owners life better? What happened to them? Did the company just decide to let those clients go?

[Joel_Mckay]

Collecting clients other people hosed is an easy business. Except, entrenched incompetence may still pine for the convenience of a quick sometimes-broken kludge (some folks expect everything to be glitched half the time).

I definitely understand why some techs just stop caring about customer opinions. You'll know when you are in a senior role when one starts to fantasize about being a Plumber. =3

[simonw]

Yeah, one of the biggest problems with API deprecation is that you have zero control over the roadmap of your clients.

If they can't spare the engineering time in the next six months to carry out the upgrade (and you aren't 100% mission critical to their business) they're not going to do that no matter how much you bug them.

Depending on how old the integration is they may not even still employ the engineers who built the first version, which makes it even harder for them to roadmap the work.

[Joel_Mckay]

In general, most managers just hire external firms to attempt a new version:

1. if it succeeds, the manager looks smart given your services are no longer relevant to their operations

2. if it fails, the manager looks smart as they are not responsible for the external firms business operations

It is a win-win situation for the client, but 100% bad for your business... =3