3 ms·
If we're talking about point samples, then no, it's not a good measure of performance. You may spend weeks fixing a single line in the kernel, meanwhile someon
by khazhoux 5y ago
If we're talking about point samples, then no, it's not a good measure of performance. You may spend weeks fixing a single line in the kernel, meanwhile someone else cranks out hundreds of lines of verbose but straightforward UI code every week.
And also, we can all imagine a developer who cranks out gigantic commits by padding their comments, or just being verbose, or writing bad complicated code, or even just by moving code around to get big commit numbers. I'm not talking about that.
I'm saying, if you compare apples to apples, and look at a long time horizon (i.e., look at the total of an engineer's contributions over 6 or 12 months), then I claim that yes, generally speaking, there will be a correlation between productivity and LOC. I don't see how it could be otherwise. Software is code.
Edit: Hopefully it's clear that above only applies when comparing a pure-developer to a pure-developer. If your job also includes code reviews, writing design docs, etc, then obviously your LOC goes down.
- pdimitar 5y agoI completely agree that using a median LOC over 12 or so months is much more representative. My point was that many times, especially when you are a senior programmer, you have a ton of other stuff to do like making or curating issues in Jira / GitHub, produce or edit documentation, make onboarding guides, introduce dev tooling, and many more. Normal coding can seriously take a back seat for literal months when you are senior and yet you still produce a lot of value. So yep, with your clarification I am fully with you. As long as we measure people over a long enough timeline then yes, LOC can be an accurate metric. But a lot of other things have to be taken into account as well.