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> The company has used the amount of code shipped as a major indicator of engineering output. > That metric is controversial. An important point that’s buried
by baloki 1mo ago
> The company has used the amount of code shipped as a major indicator of engineering output.
> That metric is controversial.
An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.
- lousken 1mo agoIf you use a wrong metric you get wrong results.
- seanmcdirmid 1mo agoCharles Simonyi Has that story about how a PM began publicly calling out engineering productivity by having them report weekly lines of code, and Simony one week put a negative number in for his line count. The PM stopped doing that afterward.
- eesmith 1mo agoRelated story about Bill Atkinson at Apple, reporting -2000 lines of code, at https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html . Perhaps that's the one you are thinking of? It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.
- seanmcdirmid 1mo agoI heard this directly from someone who worked with simonyi back then, although she could have been making it up.
- eesmith 1mo agoAlternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.
- seanmcdirmid 1mo agoThe story was from the time he was working on Microsoft Office, so after Parc in the early or mid 80s. I was actually just surprised someone who worked at Microsoft back then was still at Microsoft (I heard the story in 2009).
- eesmith 1mo agoI'm having a tough time making the few pieces I know fit together. When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant. (That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" mentions that Cutler, the head of the NT project, wrote some of the code, but not much. And Simonyi, like Cutler, was an expert software developer.) Wouldn't any PM for Word and Multiplan/Excel be under Simonyi? As the head, he could surely say "no" to the request, and even tell the PM to stop gathering that information, right? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Simonyi developed the "meta-programming" software production method in his PhD, which he brought to Microsoft. The meta-programmer does all the design work and architectural decisions, which the programmers then code up. If they get stuck, they take the problem back to the meta-programmer. The meta-programmer doesn't actually write lines of code, or at least those LoC are much less than what the underlying programmers write, making that measurement even less relevant for someone like Simonyi who, of course, would be a meta-programmer.
- seanmcdirmid 1mo ago[dead]
- Krei-se 1mo agoOnce had a coworker adding lots of safeguards to his code - that i knew would never trip - as he was measured by LOC in his prior workplace.