[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.