I think it is (used to be?) a common pattern.

Tom Cargill took a year off from Bell Labs Research to work in development. He joined a group where every subsystem's code was printed in a separate binder and stored on a shelf in each office. Tom discovered that one of those subsystems was almost completely redundant, as most its services were implemented elsewhere. So he spent a few months making it completely redundant. He deleted 15,000 lines of code. When he was done, he removed an entire binder from everybody's shelf. His coworkers loved it.

During his performance review, he learned that management had a metric for productivity: lines of code. Tom had negative productivity. In fact, because he was so successful, his entire group had negative productivity. He returned to Research with his tail between his legs.

-rob