SLOC as a target
Latest update:
Apparently, in the 1980s, your annual review score depended on the
amount of code you wrote that year. The more, the better.
Here's a story with a sad ending:
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2022 07:08:35 +1100
From: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: gmane.org.unix-heritage.general
Subject: Re: Re.: Princeton's "Unix: An Oral History": who was in the team in "The Attic"?
Message-ID: <CAKzdPgwNUjTLMu5xfDJ6WEawy73+aBA=qgoq19MQKzzYQ0o15A@mail.gmail.com>
I think it is (used to be?) a common pattern.
Tom Cargill took a year off from Bell Labs Research to work in development.
He joined a group where every subsystem's code was printed in a separate
binder and stored on a shelf in each office. Tom discovered that one of
those subsystems was almost completely redundant, as most its services were
implemented elsewhere. So he spent a few months making it completely
redundant. He deleted 15,000 lines of code. When he was done, he removed an
entire binder from everybody's shelf. His coworkers loved it.
During his performance review, he learned that management had a metric for
productivity: lines of code. Tom had negative productivity. In fact,
because he was so successful, his entire group had negative productivity.
He returned to Research with his tail between his legs.
-rob
Tags: quote, ойті
Authors: ag