111–120 of 134 posts
Or an electrical engineer: "How many resistors did you solder? I want them all gone."
Or an aeronautical engineer: "What does the plane weigh? I was expecting a few more tons."
Or a traffic engineer: "Why haven't you put more stop lights in?"
Or a mechanical engineer: "More gears!"
Always hard to get the bean counters to appreciate elegance.
I had a job interview once where the HR rep asked me how many lines of code I wrote a week. I responded, "On a really good week -1000, I don't remember the exact figure." She was extremely confused by this answer and wanted me to give her a number. So she said, "I'll just put down 10,000." This is also the interview where they refused to continue unless I told them how much money I made (which I don't do anymore). Th…
I have absolutely no idea of what my average LOC / week is and I would argue that it is a silly metric.
Last week I deleted 30k LOC from the project (~10% of the code base) :
-we used to have both the old & new version of the UI in the codebase so we could switch between the twos in production. Now that the new version is complete, there is no need for that.
-There were many deprecated parts of the app and unused resources, I did a big cleanup of these and I have even more work in that area.
This has resulted in way cleaner code, easier to apprehend for newcomers. The app is also lighter by 2 mo. Probably a very productive week overall.
One of the most interesting experiences I had very early on in my career was reducing a 12,000 line C program to a roughly 1,000 line version (in C itself) without losing any functionality. No, it had nothing to do with my prowess as a young coder, but solely due to the fact that my predecessor did not know what a function was nor how to use parameters. He had written unrolled versions of the same piece of code, with…
It's not just old managers that dislike negative lines of code: Static analysis tools dislike them too, under the right bureaucracy. At a certain huge company that sells seeds, they decided to start having both a base test coverage target, and a specific plugin that demanded that the coverage never went back more than half a percent from the high water mark on any given project. The engineering managers thought it wa…
Really? I always thought that it's the old, ugly and brittle code that needs unit tests the most. Especially right before the moment you finally decide to rewrite it.
Writing code is like playing jazz. It's not about the notes you are playing, its all about the notes you are not playing
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of what you say has anything to do with someone's current salary. If I'm in a job paying $50,000 in a market where the typical salary is $80,000 and I want $100,000 then asking for the $50,000 number doesn't help anyone. It's just meaningless data that clouds the issue of what you are willing to pay to hire me. I can understand asking a candidate what salary they're looking for. That's useful. It's got nothing t…
How do you know what the typical salary is?
One of the most interesting experiences I had very early on in my career was reducing a 12,000 line C program to a roughly 1,000 line version (in C itself) without losing any functionality. No, it had nothing to do with my prowess as a young coder, but solely due to the fact that my predecessor did not know what a function was nor how to use parameters. He had written unrolled versions of the same piece of code, with…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be so literal about it. I used to get defensive about that question too, but the truth is they aren't asking you how much you are making, they are asking you to start the salary negotiation so they can get a feel for what it's going to take to hire you and describe you adequately to a hiring manager. It's just an opportunity for you both to ballpark the situation and eject early if there's going to be a wide di…
> equally advantageous to both parties There ain't no such thing. Salary negotiations are pretty close to zero-sum.
I finished up a 24-month project earlier this year on a codebase of ~1M lines in which I dropped a net of almost 100k lines of code and reduced the main Visual Studio solution from 325 projects down to 105 projects. Compile times dropped from ~40 minutes to 6 minutes. If only all my projects could be that fun.
What kind of software takes 1M lines of code and 105 project? Is it one of those Java enterprise software projects?
PS D:\project\> (dir -include *.cs,*.cpp,*.h,*.idl,*.asmx -recurse | select-string .).Count
1626667