5 ms·

If true, I find the 'print out the code you wrote in the last 30-60 days' very grim and a very blunt tool for evaluating productivity.

netsharc 4y ago
Why would anyone subject themselves to such humiliation? (Well, a fat paycheck is probably an answer). It feels more like a weeding-out process, if I were a giant jerkoff billionaire, I would know anyone who submits to this bullshit will submit to further humiliation...
- zmxz 4y ago
  Why do you think it's bullshit and why do you think it's humiliation? Aren't all employees, in all companies on this planet, submitting to some form of dominance in exchange for money?
  - dthul 4y ago
    It's humiliating because printing out code (or more commonly "printing out emails") is literally a meme, and I have read multiple articles alleging that after printing, the employees were instructed to shred the papers, without anyone having looked at them. That sounds a lot like Musk trolling by demanding his underlings print their code.
    - boringg 4y ago
      That sounds like a rumor.
      - dthul 4y ago
        Reported here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30 He usually has very accurate inside information.
        boringg 4y ago
        Appreciate the sourcing. Still difficult to fathom.
    - evan_ 4y ago
      I think the implication was that they asked everyone to print the code out and then, realizing that nobody actually would be able to evaluate the code, asked everyone to shred the printouts lest they go into a dumpster where the code could be stolen.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Here's the classic story about why weighing LOC is dumb, from 1982: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
    - paulcole 4y ago
      That’s kind of like the complaints about Body Mass Index (BMI), “Well it misrepresents body builders and says world-class professional athletes are obese!” Yes, but are you a body builder or world-class professional athlete? Everybody wants to think they’re Andy Hertzfeld, but generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
      - pjc50 4y ago
        > for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive. No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the thing you might actually care about - business value - under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can figure it out himself.
        paulcole 4y ago
        I didn’t say that LOC is the metric. My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric. If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you had, the action items from those meetings, and what changed as a result. Nearly every job’s productivity can be showed in a pretty simple way. It’s the people who argue that their contribution can’t be simply shown that are often not that productive.
        ben_w 4y ago
        > My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric. OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition. This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his given argument when we challenged him on this was that he "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set to private" (yes really his defence was that bad). Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this method" comments to the original, because the original was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class duplicated all of these too. So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good additions.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    To make the example extreme, if you got hired to be a developer, and your boss asks you to clean the toilets, is it okay because hey, he's paying for you to do whatever he wants? You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is over my line.
    - badpun 4y ago
      It's apprarently fairly common for office workers in Japan to clean toilets of their offices. They see as part of taking care of their surroundings (something they perceive as required for harmonious functioning as a human) and not at all beneath them. It starts in elementary schools, where children clean up the school themselves.
      - netsharc 4y ago
        Sure, different cultures, different rules. If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50 printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job, hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that company...
        boringg 4y ago
        What if the "know-nothing jerkoff CEO" also printed off his 50 pages of code at the same time? Would it make it an acceptable deal at that point?
      - workingdog 4y ago
        We've adopted "everyone cleans toilets" in our company 0) It keeps me (the CEO) humble 1) It weeds out the prima-donnas 3) It develops respect, everyone leaves the toilet better than they found it
      - eitland 4y ago
        Haven't experienced exactly that but I often did non-coding tasks: - lunch shopping and preparations, clean up - transport from one branch to another for Factory Acceptance Testing - at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure everything went into the dishwasher
  - cnity 4y ago
    > I perform and you have to pay > Equal service at the end of the day > But I know what you think, you thought > 'Cause you've got the Ps, the ball's in your court, but it ain't JME - The Money
abdulhaq 4y ago
The sound of 1000 leetcode warriors printing out 2 pages of tumbleweed, sobbing over their multifunction copiers, then rushing home to record a YT video of why they left their faang dream job
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Fucking good and I hope leetcode warriors are knocked down several pegs. You shouldn't be paid more than folks with 10K GitHub stars on big projects just because you reinflicted DSA hazing on yourself. The person with 10K GitHub stars is overwhelmingly more likely to be a massive contributor than the leetcode warrior. I hope this recession kills or at least hurts leetcode warriors.
firstfewshells 4y ago
The most productive engineers I've known all crank out a ton of code in any week. It's almost like an addiction for them to push commits on a daily basis.

netsharc 4y ago

Why would anyone subject themselves to such humiliation? (Well, a fat paycheck is probably an answer). It feels more like a weeding-out process, if I were a giant jerkoff billionaire, I would know anyone who submits to this bullshit will submit to further humiliation...

zmxz 4y ago
Why do you think it's bullshit and why do you think it's humiliation? Aren't all employees, in all companies on this planet, submitting to some form of dominance in exchange for money?
- dthul 4y ago
  It's humiliating because printing out code (or more commonly "printing out emails") is literally a meme, and I have read multiple articles alleging that after printing, the employees were instructed to shred the papers, without anyone having looked at them. That sounds a lot like Musk trolling by demanding his underlings print their code.
  - boringg 4y ago
    That sounds like a rumor.
    - dthul 4y ago
      Reported here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30 He usually has very accurate inside information.
      - boringg 4y ago
        Appreciate the sourcing. Still difficult to fathom.
  - evan_ 4y ago
    I think the implication was that they asked everyone to print the code out and then, realizing that nobody actually would be able to evaluate the code, asked everyone to shred the printouts lest they go into a dumpster where the code could be stolen.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Here's the classic story about why weighing LOC is dumb, from 1982: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
  - paulcole 4y ago
    That’s kind of like the complaints about Body Mass Index (BMI), “Well it misrepresents body builders and says world-class professional athletes are obese!” Yes, but are you a body builder or world-class professional athlete? Everybody wants to think they’re Andy Hertzfeld, but generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      > for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive. No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the thing you might actually care about - business value - under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can figure it out himself.
      - paulcole 4y ago
        I didn’t say that LOC is the metric. My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric. If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you had, the action items from those meetings, and what changed as a result. Nearly every job’s productivity can be showed in a pretty simple way. It’s the people who argue that their contribution can’t be simply shown that are often not that productive.
        ben_w 4y ago
        > My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric. OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition. This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his given argument when we challenged him on this was that he "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set to private" (yes really his defence was that bad). Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this method" comments to the original, because the original was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class duplicated all of these too. So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good additions.
- netsharc 4y ago
  To make the example extreme, if you got hired to be a developer, and your boss asks you to clean the toilets, is it okay because hey, he's paying for you to do whatever he wants? You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is over my line.
  - badpun 4y ago
    It's apprarently fairly common for office workers in Japan to clean toilets of their offices. They see as part of taking care of their surroundings (something they perceive as required for harmonious functioning as a human) and not at all beneath them. It starts in elementary schools, where children clean up the school themselves.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      Sure, different cultures, different rules. If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50 printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job, hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that company...
      - boringg 4y ago
        What if the "know-nothing jerkoff CEO" also printed off his 50 pages of code at the same time? Would it make it an acceptable deal at that point?
    - workingdog 4y ago
      We've adopted "everyone cleans toilets" in our company 0) It keeps me (the CEO) humble 1) It weeds out the prima-donnas 3) It develops respect, everyone leaves the toilet better than they found it
    - eitland 4y ago
      Haven't experienced exactly that but I often did non-coding tasks: - lunch shopping and preparations, clean up - transport from one branch to another for Factory Acceptance Testing - at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure everything went into the dishwasher
- cnity 4y ago
  > I perform and you have to pay > Equal service at the end of the day > But I know what you think, you thought > 'Cause you've got the Ps, the ball's in your court, but it ain't JME - The Money

abdulhaq 4y ago

The sound of 1000 leetcode warriors printing out 2 pages of tumbleweed, sobbing over their multifunction copiers, then rushing home to record a YT video of why they left their faang dream job

Der_Einzige 4y ago
Fucking good and I hope leetcode warriors are knocked down several pegs. You shouldn't be paid more than folks with 10K GitHub stars on big projects just because you reinflicted DSA hazing on yourself. The person with 10K GitHub stars is overwhelmingly more likely to be a massive contributor than the leetcode warrior. I hope this recession kills or at least hurts leetcode warriors.

firstfewshells 4y ago

The most productive engineers I've known all crank out a ton of code in any week. It's almost like an addiction for them to push commits on a daily basis.