I told this anecdote in an internal talk at Google. You might have seen it then. -rob On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 8:08 AM Dan Cross wrote: > On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 4:09 PM Rob Pike wrote: > >> I think it is (used to be?) a common pattern. >> >> Tom Cargill took a year off from Bell Labs Research to work in >> development. He joined a group where every subsystem's code was printed in >> a separate binder and stored on a shelf in each office. Tom discovered that >> one of those subsystems was almost completely redundant, as most its >> services were implemented elsewhere. So he spent a few months making it >> completely redundant. He deleted 15,000 lines of code. When he was done, he >> removed an entire binder from everybody's shelf. His coworkers loved it. >> >> During his performance review, he learned that management had a metric >> for productivity: lines of code. Tom had negative productivity. In fact, >> because he was so successful, his entire group had negative productivity. >> He returned to Research with his tail between his legs. >> > > Was this vignette in, "The Practice of Programming"? I know I've read it > somewhere before, either there, or in the first edition of "Programming > Pearls." > > In the latter, Bentley makes a quip about incentives and lives of code. > Basically, if one incentivizes repetitive code, that's one what gets; "if > you pay by the line of code, how do you think an array with 500 elements > gets initialized?" > > - Dan C. > > On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 7:03 AM Michael Kjörling >> wrote: >> >>> On 11 Oct 2022 12:54 -0700, from lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy): >>> > On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 03:43:19PM -0400, Marc Donner wrote: >>> >> So, come annual review time he gets the most negative possible score. >>> >> Why? Because he produced -480K lines of code. >>> > >>> > Whoever wrote that review should have been fired. Absolutely no clue. >>> >>> 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? >>> >>> I definitely recall it being mentioned in _Triumph of the nerds_ as a >>> major issue between IBM and Microsoft during development of OS/2. >>> >>> -- >>> Michael Kjörling >>> https://michael.kjorling.se >>> “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?” >>> >>>