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The idea of firing people based on the number of lines of code they wrote makes sense if you think like a psychopath. On average, more productive developers wr
by GuB-42 11mo ago
The idea of firing people based on the number of lines of code they wrote makes sense if you think like a psychopath.
On average, more productive developers write more lines of code. Of course, writing more lines of code doesn't mean you are actually more productive, but the trend is there.
Elon Musk wanted to lay off 3/4 of a workforce of thousands because he thought 1/4 was enough, it is going to be disruptive no matter what and no matter how you chose, it is hard to predict the outcome. So, the general idea is to pick people randomly. But you want to bias that randomness towards keeping the best and laying off the rest, and so he picked up the number of lines of code as a criteria. It is semi-random and likely to be biased towards better productivity. It is thinking in terms of statistics, not individual people.
He is likely to be the kind of person who would have no problem banning black people from communities if it wasn't illegal. Indeed, there is more crime where there are more black people, so to lower crime, eliminate black people. And it will probably work if you ignore the fact that they are people and not just points on a chart.
- rsynnott 11mo agoI mean, you also likely lose the troubleshooters. Many completely indispensable engineers don't write a lot of code; if a month-long investigation leads to a hundred lines of code being changed and a 10% cut in machine costs, well, is that not useful work? This would be particularly on Torvalds' mind, I assume; people who fix bugs in the Linux kernel (generally not a lot of lines of code) are generally more valuable to the project than people who contribute device drivers for obscure hardware (many lines, much productive, wow!)
- GuB-42 11mo agoYou can't lay of 3/4 of your workforce without removing indispensable people. And looking at the state of X/Twitter, I would say it shows... It is never obvious who is really important. There are the troubleshooters, as you say, and also the coordinators. They are not really management, not really developers, not really sales. No one really knows what their job is but remove them and things stop working. Laying off people may have unintended ripple effects too. The not-so-productive guy you let go may be very good friends with your best engineers, and he may take them with him as he gets hired by a competitor. The best employees are the ones who can quit the most easily, as they will have no problem finding another job. In fact, the reason they are working for a company may just be because they are comfortable in there and don't bother looking elsewhere. Shaking things up too much may just be the motivation they need to find something better.