If my company is under contract to your company for a piece of software, and the software we (a team of 100 people) deliver is a million lines of code, and you ask for changes to the software that you believe fall under the contract and we believe do not fall under the contract, in any event the scale of the change, let's say it's 200K lines of code, does offer a pretty good estimate as to how long it takes to change, how much it cost, etc. as compared to the original deliverable, and wether and now such a difference of opinion might be litigated.
It's better compared to many other measures you might think of, though it's an interesting exercise to consider what might work better.
it's not a pseudo metric.
(source: I did some work for a litigation support/consulting firm, expert witnesses for defense contracting)
That's an interesting case that I hadn't thought of, or encountered myself, so thanks for sharing that!
We might be talking past each other here, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but how does the example you presented address the argument that "lines of code produced are not a useful metric for evaluating individual developer performance at hiring time"?
It's better compared to many other measures you might think of, though it's an interesting exercise to consider what might work better.
it's not a pseudo metric.
(source: I did some work for a litigation support/consulting firm, expert witnesses for defense contracting)