> A hospital manager that measures staff performance by incisions per day is clearly misguided.
Wrong analogy. I have two physicians on my staff. They both have the same years of experience, the same role, get paid the same. One sees 20 patients a day. The other sees 2 a day. That's not a red flag? I should ignore that and assume that somehow every single one of their patients is 10x more difficult, and not even bother to look into it? Because if you would agree I should look into it, then the number-of-patients was a useful metric.
A metric is just data point, no more, and not a complete picture.
> If someones LOC is very low, but they complete all their tasks on time, not only is there no problem, it is even beneficial as the work is being done without creating too much burden for future development. If someone commits a large amount of code without completing any tasks, that's clearly not useful.
I must not have been clear. I'm not arguing for bloated code. Lean code is good, of course.
I'm talking about the all-too-common developer who has some number of tasks to complete, and tells his teammates (and me, their manager) that the work is very complex, and so they land (let's say) one bug-fix a week, giving the impression that each bug-fix (or feature, whatever) was challenging. But on inspecting their code, the code itself is fine --nothing necessary wrong with it-- but the changes are all trivial and really shouldn't take a $180K/year developer two weeks or even one to crank out. LOC isn't the full picture but it's often correlated and if nothing else, it's an obvious red flag for me to investigate.
To put it simply: If you're a high-paid engineer, you can deliver big features slowly or big tough bug-fixes slowly (and the LOC doesn't matter if the problem was actually difficult), or you can crank out lots of small features and small easy fixes quickly. But if you're barely outputting any code, and trickle out a meager amount of code, and the few lines of code you merge into the repo are all trivially simple, that's not acceptable. That engineer can't cling to "Don't judge me by my LOC!" I'm not -- I'm judging by the small amount of actual value they're delivering.