[wcfrobert]

Wholeheartedly agree. SWEs are not factory workers. They don't punch in at 6am, put on their uniforms, make sure they meet their daily "lines of code" quota before clocking out at 10pm. We should not measure software productivity the same way we measure ball bearings production.

Using lines of code to track productivity is absurd (do people really believe it or is it just a strawman at this point?). I'm reminded of that midwit meme where a junior has very few lines of code written because they don't know the code base well enough, the midwit writes up an whole framework, and the senior engineer has a net negative lines of code contribution.

Theres also a fundamental difference between creating and maintaining code. Something like 10 guys wrote visicalc. Does that mean they were contributing millions of dollars in profit per hours? What about the maintainance to keep it going? Bug fixes? Patches? On call infra guys? What about opportunity cost of putting engineers on deadend projects?

My point is tracking productivity in software dev - maybe all knowledge work for that matter - is complicated. Maybe that's why there's so much "busywork" (emails, slack, tickets, meetings, etc). Everyone wants to look productive but no one knows what it means