[gentleman11]

I read that most enterprise software developers write about 3k sloc per year on huge projects, in terms of final code add size (not lines added), but that it varies quite a bit. Has anyone ever found these sorts of metrics to be helpful in their experience? Wouldn’t be any good for individual performance but what about for projects as a whole?

[marcosdumay]

Code size is a great indicator of the complexity of some software and how much work it will be to maintain it. It is also a reasonably good, but far from perfect indicator of how much work went on building it.

That measure is also one of the arguments for highly expressive languages, because developers seem to produce approximately the same length of code whatever language they use. And leads to some very good questions about why that length changes a lot from one place to another, but doesn't change much when one changes the more development-centric options (like the language or editor/IDE).

But, of course, if you start ranking people based on it, it will stop being a good predictor of anything.