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Comment by mshockwave

5 years ago

It's crazy that even in 2021, I know some of the teams are still measuring productivity by LOC _only_. People just never learn the lesson since '80

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mshockwave

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segfaultbuserr  5 years ago

> Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. - Bill Gates (alleged)

According to Wikiquote there is no primary source to show he really said that. Nevertheless, Steve Ballmer did,

> "In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing."

Not really a fan of either of them, but we can all agree on the quote.

goostavos  5 years ago

I'd be happy if lessons from the '60s-'70s(ish?) could be applied. Despite Mythical Man Month being 'required reading', I still sit in planning meetings where management discusses how they'll make a baby in 1 month because they're putting 9 "resources" on it.

asdff  5 years ago

Must be great for those teams. Want to make an argument for a raise to non-tech management? Start writing paragraph comments and flowery code.