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Wasnt there a story about a graybeard who, upon being turned into a gamafied LOC programmer, ended up changing 2 lines and removing 2000? He put -1998 lines on
by crankylinuxuser 6y ago
Wasnt there a story about a graybeard who, upon being turned into a gamafied LOC programmer, ended up changing 2 lines and removing 2000?
He put -1998 lines on his daily email?
And I think that hits to the core of Goodhart's law:
""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.""
- Moto7451 6y agoYou might be thinking of https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
- crankylinuxuser 6y agoIndeed! That's it :) Thank you for finding it.
- folkhack 6y agoLol - old graybeard ... it was Bill freakin' Atkinson. Author of HyperCard and one of my heroes! This story came up often when I said I read the commits daily. I would just roll my eyes and say "I read code, I don't look at arbitrary LOC". If the story is true it shows incompetence with the managers to pick such an arbitrary metric to measure with. Plus, when you start policing people like this you can damn-near guarantee motivation goes in the trashcan because now it's a "me vs. you" thing... and eww who wants to come to work with THAT?!