It's not about meetings, incompetence, or lax work hours. It's the reality of software maintenance. Lines of code is an awful metric of productivity but, yes,

It's not about meetings, incompetence, or lax work hours. It's the reality of software maintenance. Lines of code is an awful metric of productivity but, yes, that figure of 3250 is accurate. Between 1,000 and 10,000 LoC per year is normal for a software engineer in the industry, and the rate is often closer to the lower number. Note also that code of average architectural quality will require about 1 maintenance day per year per 80 LoC just by virtue (vice?) of existing. (Paul Graham: a full-time maintenance engineer can own 20,000 lines of code.) LoC are a cost: if we rate a developer's time (including benefits, office space, etc.) at $80/hour and charge each LoC for 4 years, we pay $32 per line of code in maintenance. (We spend $2-3 per line to write it.) That is, IMO, a pretty accurate estimate of what we pay for software. If you write at 500 LoC/day under ideal circumstances but you're writing code that's merely average in architectural integrity, the maintenance problem will catch up with you very quickly. It's a lot better to write 150 lines per day of great code (200-300 including unit tests and debugging utilities) and maintain that pace than to start out at 500+ but stall out late in the project. Great programmers don't write code at college-project speeds; they write in such a way that they can sustain triple-digits in perpetuity. A single developer solves this problem by refactoring the code when necessary and incrementally improving the architecture so as to reduce the maintenance cost. It's only by doing this that projects beyond about 15,000 lines of code per person (75% maintenance burden if code is of average quality) are even feasible. It's not just a problem of incompetent developers. Maintenance imposes a 70 to 90% overhead on most important projects in large companies, just because these projects become difficult or impossible to refactor and fix and their "broken windows" patterns of decline take on a life of their own. Individual developers can refactor aggressively when their maintenance burden breaks 50% (70% being a crisis) but this is not usually feasible for multi-developer enterprise projects that have changed hands several times. The more progressive large companies now actively discourage any mention of LoC in performance reviews. First, deleting unnecessary code is one of the best things a person can do for a code base. Second, if someone in a big company generates 250 LoC/day reliably over years, it doesn't always mean that person is a great programmer; it could mean that, or it could mean that he's always taking the fun, "green field" projects and passing the legacy maintenance (on which 10 LoC/day is a typical clip) to others.