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-2000 Lines of Code (2004)

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Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#121

Post by dandare »

hibikir wrote: post #74

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…

Wow, I would try to escalate it or eventually resign. I am so tired of this BS :(

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#122

Post by 72deluxe »

jgord wrote: post #114
gjkood wrote: post #31

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…

... I remember deleting ~500 C++ files .. they were all classes that differed by a constant, so I just passed in a parameter. Was not popular at all, they liked lots of files.

That sounds stupid. Did they not know about inheritance or template classes or anything??

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#123

Post by unholiness »

mgkimsal wrote: post #5
bargl wrote: post #3

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…

> The justification they told me was that they weren't going to give me a 20K raise if I wasn't making that much right now Even after 20+ years in the labor force, I've never understood that justification. "I'm a nosy bastard" at least has a ring of truth to it.

Serious question: Why is asking your salary any less relevant then asking for your previous place of employment? If I say I did X on project Y at Google, that's a pretty incomplete picture of how valuable my coworkers and bosses found my work on project Y. Thus, it seems like a salary is another potentially helpful data point indicating how valuable I've been to previous companies.

Obviously in a better world it would be possible to glean this information from an interview alone, but the bottom line is that interviews generally suck at informing how useful a candidate is going to be. A candidate who claims they've done valuable work is potentially exaggerating, and it's difficult to tell by how much. That's (part of) why we have resumes, and (most of) why an employer wants to know your previous salary.

Note that I'm asking this unironically. I know that "never tell anyone your salary" is a popular point of discussion here, but I have trouble seeing why it's any different from, say, a grad school asking for your GPA.

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#124

Post by Lawtonfogle »

unholiness wrote: post #123
mgkimsal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The justification they told me was that they weren't going to give me a 20K raise if I wasn't making that much right now Even after 20+ years in the labor force, I've never understood that justification. "I'm a nosy bastard" at least has a ring of truth to it.

Serious question: Why is asking your salary any less relevant then asking for your previous place of employment? If I say I did X on project Y at Google, that's a pretty incomplete picture of how valuable my coworkers and bosses found my work on project Y. Thus, it seems like a salary is another potentially helpful data point indicating how valuable I've been to previous companies. Obviously in a better world it woul…

For starters, the grad school won't be giving you a lower GPA depending upon the one you give them.

But the bigger issue is that they rarely ever give their hiring range, so why give them more info that can only hurt me?

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#125

Post by dacohenii »

unholiness wrote: post #123
mgkimsal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The justification they told me was that they weren't going to give me a 20K raise if I wasn't making that much right now Even after 20+ years in the labor force, I've never understood that justification. "I'm a nosy bastard" at least has a ring of truth to it.

Serious question: Why is asking your salary any less relevant then asking for your previous place of employment? If I say I did X on project Y at Google, that's a pretty incomplete picture of how valuable my coworkers and bosses found my work on project Y. Thus, it seems like a salary is another potentially helpful data point indicating how valuable I've been to previous companies. Obviously in a better world it woul…

I live in an area of the US where the cost of living is low (think $1.60/gallon and $725/month to rent a 2-bedroom apartment).

If I'm interviewing for a potential employer in an area with a higher cost-of-living, I'd (in a certain sense) be cheating myself to state my current pay.

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#126

Post by nickpsecurity »

on_and_off wrote: post #110
nickpsecurity wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the current average in a language like C# or Java for a skilled developer? Average that goes into production rather than what's likely thrown away.

I have senior in my title so I guess I count as skilled, I work on an Android app (so Java). I have absolutely no idea of what my average LOC / week looks like and could not care less. This is a really dumb metric. Between Annotation processors & code generation plugins, it already means nothing. If you factor in DRY, it is just insane. Am I supposed to willingly write horrible and unproductive code just to increase…

"Between Annotation processors & code generation plugins, it already means nothing."

Getting a project of a given size done on schedule means nothing? Your company sounds pretty laid back. That's nice.

"Am I supposed to willingly write horrible and unproductive code just to increase my LOC / time ?"

It's a nice strawman you built there. The metric in your case would be average, custom LOC brought into production. So, it would hopefully be productive, great code at a certain rate. The rate varies among people and programming approaches.

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#127

Post by boxidea »

Zelphyr wrote: post #6
cpeterso wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

520,000 lines of code per year! :)

Couple that with pay and just tell them to pay you $1 per line of code written.

# Need to increment this count so it matches up with the length of the list we just created.

count = 1

count = count + 1

count = count + 1

count = count + 1

count = count + 1

count = count + 1

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#128

Post by jason_slack »

wingerlang wrote: post #58
jason_slack wrote: post #28

I worked at a furniture company where in order to delete code you had to have the head IT guy, the IT Director and an outside consultant sign off on it. Yes, that is right! 2 people that didn't know how to code and an outside consultant that we paid to look over "IT" moves before we made them. However, I didn't need anyone to sign off on commenting out code and replacing it with something else. :-)

Could you one week later delete "comments" without sign off?

I was one of 2 coders that worked there, but we did different things. We were supposed to do "code reviews", monthly with each other. We did, but we usually went to a Denny's (open 24 hours) and literally hung out there for 15 hours, ate 3 times, etc and reviewed things. We cared about code quality and not having to band-aid.

We had a saying: "Comment in a fix....". This is our way of saying to each other that we needed to re-write code and to get around "red tape" we would comment out and replace the code.

So if comments confused things, we removed them, with a comment that previous comments "were confusing" or "no longer applied" :-)

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#129

Post by koide »

mgkimsal wrote: post #23
wdewind wrote: post #18

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…

No... there are recruiters who are a lot more invasive and pushy (and a couple employers I've run across). "Proof of previous income" was required at one place I applied years back, and I've heard similar stories from colleagues. No, of course, I don't bother going forward in those situations. "What are you making now?" is crass. The good recruiters I've worked with phrased it as "what are your salary expectations?"…

What's really fun about that is that most people I interview, when asked "what are your salary expectations?" answer with "I'm currently at XYZ a year"

Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)

#130

Post by curiousGambler »

kkapelon wrote: post #95
hibikir wrote: post #74

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…

Great story! You should submit this to http://thedailywtf.com/

Given that all I could think was "wtf?!" as that story went on, definitely!
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