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Some people at Google are actually quite proud of six digit _negative_ line counts they've contributed. And I think they have every right to be proud of that.

• Swizec 9y ago
  That’s why you track changes made. Throughout my career imve found that number of changes comitted correlates pretty well with features delivered and bugs fixed. Also with feature and bug size. Yes there are edge cases when it takes a day of debugging to make a 1-line fix, but those are rare. Just like it’s very rare to deliver a useful new feature by changing a single line. Yes there are also features that are tracked as a real ticket and require a 1-line copy change and nothing else. Nobody thinks doing those makes you hella productive, it just needs to be done. As for padding lines and changes. That’s what code review is for.
  • 0xbear 9y ago
    That would be a bad metric for those "negative" folks as well. Their job is called "code cultivation", and they modify everything in Google's monorepo to make it suck less. Often this is done using automated tools, with a subsequent full run of affected tests and human code review. I've never seen anything like this anywhere else, and I probably won't for the rest of my career.
  • 0xbear 9y ago
    As to what one should track, one should track _results_ if you've managed to accomplish something useful with very little code, that is decidedly better than accomplishing the same with much more code and hundreds of check-ins. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
    • Swizec 9y ago
      > one should track _results_ One should, but companies often care more about effort than results. They can manage based on effort, they can't manage based on results. If you spend 2 days getting the same results as somebody else does in 5 days, guess what, they don't want you milling around those extra 3 days and bringing morale down. Gotta give you more work!
      • thanksgiving 9y ago
        Well at that point I think you've hit the agency problem where management's goals and the organization's goals are different. The organization's goal is delivering results but that is not necessarily what management wants right now.
      • 0xbear 9y ago
        And worse: in more than one megacorp (including Google in late aughts) I've seen _complexity_ as a requirement for promotion. Google has tried to get rid of that de jure, but it remains a requirement in practice, so people do what they are rewarded for: create complexity.
• rb2k_ 9y ago
  Facebook has a "dead code society" t-shirt for these kind of single commit delete numbers as well :)