Saw this Bill Gates quote pop up and it had me thinking:
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
I feel like the problem people have with using lines of code (LoC) as a measure of impactful-ness or progress is that it’s not a holistic measure. I agree with that — you can’t choose to hire or fire someone strictly by the number of lines they’ve written. Someone who writes thousands of words a day doesn’t immediately become a novelist.
My weird “issue” (it’s not really an issue but more of a reflection) with this is that I also feel like it’s more of a spectrum. Like there’s probably some correlation between the amount of code written and how experienced a dev is — you have to write more code to get better at coding.
Maybe it’s even way more than a spectrum because you can’t evaluate how good of an engineer someone is or progress of a project by a single dimension. That analysis spreads into many different spaces. Against what I commonly see in media, I think LoC can be taken into account, and they can indicate something, but one needs to be very very careful about not jumping into the hole of thinking it’s justification for something so major.