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Comment by duderific | Hacker News Reader

They don't always make the comment out loud, but you can tell they're thinking it.

They absolutely use lines of code metric at my company. I don't miss any chance to tell my manager it's complete bullshit. His answer: "Engineers are supposed to write code, just like construction workers are supposed to build houses."

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What an absurd response from your manager.

If you give a construction worker a design to build a wall, and the worker is given 2,000 bricks that must be used to build the wall, then, yes, of course the worker must lay down all 2,000 bricks to build that wall. However, if I am asked to build a computer-simulated model of said wall, and if there is a way to build the model with 200 lines of code that looks and performs identically to a model built with 2,000 lines of code, then, yes, of course I am going to build the wall with 200 lines of code.

I hope you find better pastures.

Hell, if you can find a construction worker that somehow, magically can build the wall with 200 bricks instead of 2000, everyone would want to hire them because they’re saving them 90% of the cost.

"Okay. And when 5 years down the road you discover it's 10x as expensive to replace the floor joists. Why? Because you based the builder's performance on how many materials were in the house and as a result the piping in the basement is an overdone rats nest anyone maintaining the home has to work around."

What if the construction workers just stack all the windows in one corner and pour all the concrete in the other? It must be just as good as building the house properly since they used the same amount of materials. If they just double the amount, the resulting pile of garbage will be twice as good as a functioning house.

Oof, that's a false equivalence. Construction workers have blueprints for how things are supposed to be built. You're (generally) making the blueprint as you go along, based on vague specifications in many cases. This can depend a lot on how your organization designs software, of course.

And... guess who made the drawing (blueprints have not been used in a while)? An engineer. Probably using a vague spec by an architect, too.

And I can assure you, they were not judged on the number of views or pages on their drawing, or on the number of variables in their structural calculations.

"If you wanted someone who writes as many lines as possible, you should have hired a secretary."

Can you please help your brothers out and hint at what company this is so we can all avoid?

It has other good things that keep me there. Everything's a tradeoff.

Set prettier on VS Code to make each line one character long on commit. Rebase your code on your branch after done and run it.

It took 23 minutes for that rule to dissappear after my lines of code metric jumped 250,000k

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