[TUHS] LOC [was Re: Re: Re.: Princeton's "Unix: An Oral History": who was in the team in "The Attic"?

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 12:52 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 2:34 PM Charles H Sauer (he/him) <sauer at technologists.com> wrote:
>> On 10/11/2022 3:14 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote:
>> > On 11 Oct 2022 13:10 -0700, from lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy):
>> >>> Isn't it relatively well established, though, that IBM culture at
>> >>> least for a very long time put heavy emphasis on counting lines of
>> >>> source code, and that more SLOC was considered to be better?
>> >>
>> >> That's just stupid.
>> >
>> > You're getting no argument from me there.
>>
>> It was likely true that some parts of IBM put heavy emphasis on LOC, but
>> as Marc points out, that wasn't true in Research. I don't remember heavy
>> LOC emphasis in AIX groups, and I suspect even in Boca (OS/2) there was
>> not "heavy" emphasis.
>
> Speaking of "just stupid"
>
> Word on the street is that Elon Musk stack ranked the engineers by lines of code
> over the last year (source: https://ma.nu/blog/bye-twitter) and layed off the bottom
> performers in terms of LoC...

Well, if I ever go to work for Twitter, I know how I'm initializing
large arrays.

> Not 100% sure this is legit, since some tweets about it have been deleted.

I suspect it was slightly more nuanced, having more to do with "total output"
measured as some combination of number of changes and their total size.

It sure is dumb, though.

        - Dan C.