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> 50 LOC is industry average Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm talking about 50 LOC every 2 weeks or so. Like, seriously low LOC of seriously low-complexity (someti
by khazhoux 5y ago
> 50 LOC is industry average
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm talking about 50 LOC every 2 weeks or so. Like, seriously low LOC of seriously low-complexity (sometimes trivial) code.
I don't actually have a numerical target people should hit. Not at all. It's more like this: on several occasions now (all too common), I've taken over management of a team, and in our initial team meetings and 1:1s, some developer talks about what they're working on and say it's really challenging but they're making progress and making progress and making progress. Then a couple of weeks in, I look at their commit history, and they've committed 6 times in the last 3 months. I give them benefit of the doubt, those must have been 6 meaningful commits. Then the first thing that stands out, the first red flag: each commit is like 25-50 lines. At this point, I have very strong reason to think we have a problem. But of course, to confirm, you look at the code itself, and one commit is just adding a command-line argument/option to a python script. Another commit tweaks some CSS. Or does a bit of dict/list operations that any developer should be able to knock out in 30 minutes.
My first hint that I need to dig in was the low LOC. Obviously, no one goes to a performance plan because they're not "hitting numbers." And obviously, someone whose job is architecture, system design, etc, isn't coding all day, so I'm not at all concerned with how much code they're cranking out. But for those whose job is, primarily, to code, well if you're writing low-complexity code (which is OK in a lot of cases) but you're writing very little low-complexity code... that's a problem.
PS: For a couple of years on my last multi-hundred-developer project, I ran a twice-yearly Code Reduction Week, and I emcee'd the All-Hands where we celebrated the developers who deleted the most code.
- eesmith 5y agoThanks for the clarification! I see how I got confused.
- arcbyte 5y agoLOC isn't a meaningful metric. Flat out. You can think it is, but it's such a toxic, nonsensical concept that you deserve to get pushback for mentioning it. It's a waste of time in the presence of actually useful criteria product/project-related metrics. Teams of people build things. LOC don't add up to a hill of beans.
- khazhoux 5y agoWhen that one person on the team barely commits any code, and isn't busy with design docs or anything else, they just don't commit hardly any code, taking a week to land 10 lines that adds a new argparse option that you could have written in 5 minutes, then I'll be curious to understand how their tiny amount of LOC isn't relevant. I think maybe you haven't seen how unproductive some people can be. And one hint of their productivity, is that they don't have much code to show for. If someone can explain to me how they're writing significant amount of new software with less code than this comment I'm typing right now, I'd be interested to learn how they did it.