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Lines or amount of code written is a terrible, and easily gamed metric. Some of the very best engineers write the fewest lines of code, often making fewer yet
by nfiedel 4y ago
Lines or amount of code written is a terrible, and easily gamed metric.
Some of the very best engineers write the fewest lines of code, often making fewer yet better abstractions that fulfill more business use cases more simply. They might also help others write less code.
Some of the most prolific coders are great. And some are terrible. The challenge is discerning the two. Coaching a prolific yet bad coder to slow down can be as challenging as coaching up a slower / not yet confident coder. And the slower coder will do vastly less damage in the interim.
- bpodgursky 4y agoI understand this as theoretical possibility, and it could lead you astray if you're trying to tell a 40% developer from a 60% developer... but in practice I have never met a superstar IC who doesn't also ship a ton of code (even while they help out others). If you fire the 10% of ICs who push the least code, to within a rounding error you're extremely unlikely to regret it.
- Foobar8568 4y agoYour best engineers are facilitators, not coding monkeys.
- bpodgursky 4y agoYour best engineers are both.
- Foobar8568 4y agoYou can't do both unless you are one in your team. The more people, the less code you'll do. Software engineering goals is to solve human problems, you can't escape human relation, which eventually means facilitating stuff.
- manigandham 4y agoThose are not engineers then, they're managers. It's strange to see this confusion when it comes to software. Any other discipline and you wouldn't say engineers that don't do any engineering are the best engineers.
- robbintt 4y agoThey are still ICs, not people managers.
- manigandham 4y agoProject management != people management. Either way, IC means primarily a producer of work product, not a manager.
- Foobar8568 4y agoProject management!= manager. And your PM/PO whatever won't coach your junior devs...
- mstipetic 4y agoThat’s usually what poor engineers tell themselves
- sirclueless 4y agoThat may be true but people here aren't talking about firing the bottom 10% of ICs, they're talking about firing "50% of Google".