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This reminds me of the time when this company giving requirement to all their employers to write down how much line of code they have written this week and this senior engineer who was working on an optimization problem wrote -1000. From there on the company removed that policy. (forgot the company, person's name, and the number)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
150 000 lines of code / (10 hours * 5 days * 4 weeks) = a sustained 750 lines of code an hour? That's impressive. Can you share a bit more about how you manage to achieve such productivity for those of us who aspire to be like that?
750 LOC/hour on average? The secret to that is either having a very loose definition of code (e.g. counting generated files, copy and pasting huge amounts of boilerplate, etc) or a very loose definition of honesty. Nobody is that productive, especially not working 10 hours a day. If I do 750 LOC in a week, that's a good week!
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who feels this way.
The point of the article is just to say "make it count". But since everyone is talking about the number of lines... This reminds me of the time when this company giving requirement to all their employers to write down how much line of code they have written this week and this senior engineer who was working on an optimization problem wrote -1000. From there on the company removed that policy. (forgot the company, per…
Very likely Apple.
OK, since a lot of comments here are discussing Software Architecture in general, I would like to ask a question that I've been wanting to for a long time: As a Developer with ~2 years of experience and desiring to be a Software Architect, how do I get there? And by that I mean: how do I develop the talent to design large/complex/distributed software systems, when I'm actually really working on much smaller things on…
IMHO, there's no such thing as a Software Architect. Take this for what you will, but people that label themselves as being architects are an instant red flag, as that's usually corporate slang for I'm incompetent, but I can draw diagrams and have meetings . The industry is simply separated in developers that suck (because they lack either the experience or the ability) and those that don't and that are thus capable…
I mean things like: "Problems X, Y, and Z are actually all caused by the other teams trying to work around the bad build-system. We should fix that first."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO, there's no such thing as a Software Architect. Take this for what you will, but people that label themselves as being architects are an instant red flag, as that's usually corporate slang for I'm incompetent, but I can draw diagrams and have meetings . The industry is simply separated in developers that suck (because they lack either the experience or the ability) and those that don't and that are thus capable…
So what would be the non-"red-flag" way? I mean things like: "Problems X, Y, and Z are actually all caused by the other teams trying to work around the bad build-system. We should fix that first."
~Dijkstra
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO, there's no such thing as a Software Architect. Take this for what you will, but people that label themselves as being architects are an instant red flag, as that's usually corporate slang for I'm incompetent, but I can draw diagrams and have meetings . The industry is simply separated in developers that suck (because they lack either the experience or the ability) and those that don't and that are thus capable…
So what would be the non-"red-flag" way? I mean things like: "Problems X, Y, and Z are actually all caused by the other teams trying to work around the bad build-system. We should fix that first."
OK, since a lot of comments here are discussing Software Architecture in general, I would like to ask a question that I've been wanting to for a long time: As a Developer with ~2 years of experience and desiring to be a Software Architect, how do I get there? And by that I mean: how do I develop the talent to design large/complex/distributed software systems, when I'm actually really working on much smaller things on…
IMHO, there's no such thing as a Software Architect. Take this for what you will, but people that label themselves as being architects are an instant red flag, as that's usually corporate slang for I'm incompetent, but I can draw diagrams and have meetings . The industry is simply separated in developers that suck (because they lack either the experience or the ability) and those that don't and that are thus capable…
It might be said that the definition of "size" for a computer system is exactly the degree to which it requires "architecture" to make it.
Under that interpretation one way to try to become a "Software Architect" is to study large systems and how they succeed or fail at their intended purposes.
1k loc / week sounds like a lot. As a teenager, I got a tour of a company doing contract work for the government making drones. Their manager said they average 12 lines of "final" code per day per engineer over the course of a project. I was stunned and shocked it's so low, but it has stuck with me ever since. After many years more experience, factoring in bug rates and debugging time and meetings and rewrites and al…
The thing is - most code is not final. You end up writing exploratory code to test out a product, code that's rewritten because requirements change, code to test the actual code, code for projects that go nowhere and end up canceled, code for throwaway migration tools and other important tasks that aren't in the product but are necessary to build the product, code to make your job easier. All of that takes time, but it's not included in the metrics.
When I was at Google I used to joke that the half-life of my code was about a year, meaning that after a year, roughly half the code I'd written had been ripped out and replaced. Casual conversations with many other engineers indicated that their numbers were pretty similar. Over the course of 5.5 year career there, I wrote IIRC about 230,000 lines (there was a tool where you could instantly visualize your code delta across all projects you worked on). With a half life of a year, that's nearly 6 half-lives, meaning less than 1/64th of the code I wrote still exists in the codebase. It works out to about 3 lines of code/day, even though on an instantaneous week-to-week basis I was coding close to 1000 lines/week.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what would be the non-"red-flag" way? I mean things like: "Problems X, Y, and Z are actually all caused by the other teams trying to work around the bad build-system. We should fix that first."
That isn't actually a position. If you have good devs, the other teams will have communicated that up; if you have good managers, they'll in turn give the teams the freedom to fix the build system (or to work with the devops team to fix it, if there is one).
Doing this properly for 3-8 teams might well leave that person with little time to contribute meaningfully to any given project, but the bird's-eye view can be very much worth it.