100% right. I just watched an OJ Simpson trial documentary. From that making the small point being famous brings perception then perception management... Which goes fast to nowhere. Fixing Twitter can't start with loc and the new owner reading code. I can guarantee Gerstner never did that at ibm.

I agree. They probably don't have any experience in Big Tech if that's really the case.

I’ve worked in big companies and I’ve worked in small companies. The one constant has been that writing code is required to make product changes. No code likely means no changes. Maybe LOC != productivity makes sense when algorithms are of great importance, like in situations where a genius algorithm can unlock tons of value. Machine learning would be one example. However, most work is feature work, which typically has a straightforward path from start to finish. In product feature work, it’s unclear to me what activity would use time productively that didn’t result in lines of code.

I think LoC has been determined to be a bad productivity metric because it’s gameable and incentivizes bad behavior. However, that doesn’t apply here as the engineers didn’t know they were going to be evaluated by LoC a priori. I struggle to think of cases were lines-changed wouldn’t be correlated with the productivity of engineers working in a consistent environment if they weren’t trying to game the system.

Or just printing out diffs, not that I advocate for this position