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.
Was this vignette in, "The Practice of Programming"? I know I've read it somewhere before, either there, or in the first edition of "Programming Pearls."
In the latter, Bentley makes a quip about incentives and lives of code. Basically, if one incentivizes repetitive code, that's one what gets; "if you pay by the line of code, how do you think an array with 500 elements gets initialized?"
- Dan C.
On 11 Oct 2022 12:54 -0700, from lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy):
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 03:43:19PM -0400, Marc Donner wrote:
>> So, come annual review time he gets the most negative possible score.
>> Why? Because he produced -480K lines of code.
>
> Whoever wrote that review should have been fired. Absolutely no clue.
Isn't it relatively well established, though, that IBM culture at
least for a very long time put heavy emphasis on counting lines of
source code, and that more SLOC was considered to be better?
I definitely recall it being mentioned in _Triumph of the nerds_ as a
major issue between IBM and Microsoft during development of OS/2.
--
Michael Kjörling
https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”