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0 pointsMandatum4y ago0 comments

Who tracks that?

0 comments

At a Tier 1 Investment Bank, there was a manager (ED/MD) from Bear Stearns who said explicitly in his first meeting with the whole department that he will track and rank people in the IT org based upon their lines of code and fire the losers. Everyone. Business analyst? Better find a way to get some code in. PM? Better make that spreadsheet a Java app.

Managers even bought Java textbooks to put on their desk as some kind of totem as if their days weren't 100% filled with political skirmishes.

Don't think it ever came to pass but this nonsense reaches the highest levels of the wealthiest orgs.

slt20214y ago

IBM and Microsoft used to do that a little bit more than a decade ago. Not surprisingly it turnes out that counting LOC leads to shitty spaghettincode and copy paste all over the place and complete ignore of DRY principle

2sk214y ago

I mostly worked in IBM research but once spent a few months on assignment in a product developed group in the mid 1990s. At the weekly group meeting, each developer would mention throw many lines of code had been reused. Turned out that there was a big monetary incentive to reuse code so developers would randomly include enormous libraries to pad out their numbers!

MattGaiser4y ago

I had a manager who wanted to track it weekly and put it on a dashboard besides dev names.

Thankfully he realized the idea was terrible/other events made it irrelevant, but it was discussed and code written to support doing it.

cerved4y ago

the version control system?

oblio4y ago

You still to do extra legwork to extract the info.

It's not just:

git contrib --linecount jdoe

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse