I believe the studies you are referring to measured 3 lines of shipping code produced per programmer-day. This doesn't mean that Joe the Hacker went to his ter

I believe the studies you are referring to measured 3 lines of shipping code produced per programmer-day. This doesn't mean that Joe the Hacker went to his terminal and only typed three lines; it means that other people re-wrote code, or he spent a lot of time debugging something that was a short fix, or that a lot of programmer time was devoted to projects that were never shipped. I'm not trying to defend mediocre programmers here, but I think you've misinterpreted a study that intentionally combines individual productivity with organizational productivity. * Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the actual study report. If someone can locate it I'd appreciate it.