On Managing Customers and Line Counting
Ran into this little gem accidentally and while it is a bit broad, it mostly hits my hot points. As a software development shop I often run into a manager who likes to see their US$80K equate to $n lines of code. In other words, “we’d expect at least 200K lines of code for the $80K we spent with you”. I like to call this “line counting” and typically despise the notion because it seems apply a generic dollar amount for each line of code written. I often think that you should be paid more ‘per line’ as the number of lines you write diminishes. You can’t lock on to this rule in a universal manner but often, as a developer, you get penalized for writing efficient code because it doesn’t “look” like much. As an example, you could write 1000 lines of code and accomplish a specific task. Or, you could sit and think for a few hours and accomplish the same task with 8 lines of code AND in a much more efficient manner. Line counting bites you hard in this case because you have more to maintain and your process is less efficient in the long run, for the same money.
Whatever, I found the above post interesting and related to how I often think.
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