[mbac32768]

I'm impressed Torvalds managed to not know what he was referring to (the Twitter firings).

The missing context whenever this comes up is the fact that it was a surprise one off.

If developers have no idea they're going to be graded by lines of code at some random future date that's a much different situation than saying you're going to give bonuses away every month based on how many lines of code were written.

Everyone knows the second is bad, it'll be gamed massively. The first one could be useful though.

And yes doing it as a one off is still problematic and you can think of all kinds of exceptions, but if you think the organization is full of dead weight in general and overhired massively, a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.

[NekkoDroid]

> a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.

I can write you an efficient algorithm in 2 lines or an inefficient one in 50. The metric is about as useful as a doctor checking how often someone picked up a bottle to figure out how much they drink.

[rsynnott]

> I'm impressed Torvalds managed to not know what he was referring to (the Twitter firings).

I mean, naughty old Mr Car didn't _invent_ this nonsense; IBM was fairly notorious for it in the 80s, say. He's probably the most prominent recent example.

> The first one could be useful though.

How?

> a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.

No. It's really not. For a start, you probably lose basically everyone very senior by that mechanism. But also you lose the troubleshooters.

[red-iron-pine]

Torvalds talking out of his ass? impossible