“I’m sorry for the long letter, but I didn’t have the time to write a shorter one.”
You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
11–20 of 522 posts
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#12"Because I had to spend a lot of time to compile this long list of things that I also did while fixing the problem which are essential for a good solution but aren't immediately visible from the two lines I actually added so I would have something in hand to rebut this stupid question of yours!"
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#13Because I procrastinated due to the overwhelming complexity overloading my mind with the myriad scenarios resulting from those two necessary lines and my lack of experience with this scenario depriving me of the intuition necessary to prune the aforementioned tree of mental complexity in an efficient manner.
Because I have spent time thinking, not merely typing. (The error "programmers are just overpaid typists" is widespread)
My first boss and my boss two positions ago both thought that way. It was incredibly frustrating. Along with: If only you programmers would stop putting in bugs we'd ship perfect software every time. (When most of the "bugs" were specification errors and not program logic errors.)
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#14Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
This scenario seems like something that's more common in freelance work where the client has access to the code for whatever reason.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#15Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
You'd be surprised...
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#16Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
I know someone that worked at some skeezy company in Menlo Park that got passed up for a raise after spending months navigating the bureaucracy to save the company millions on their operating costs because they didn't write enough code. This was in the last four years.
Edit: And they quit right afterwards.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#17Because I had to explore all the things that wouldn't work before finding the two lines that did.
This summarizes the argument pretty well and should suffice as a tl;dr.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#18Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
I'm a maintainer of an OSS project with other contributors. I have fights like this all the time because others are constantly just wanting to fix the symptoms. This is for a project that is a framework/API, where the saying "the best programmers remove more code than they add" should be even more true.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#19Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
I regularly hear a friend complain about BS like this and variants. "Why did adding a button take a week, it's just a button?!" is also very popular. Not sure what's worse, that or the recurring "that element should be 1px to the left, drop everything you're working on and fix it asap"...
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#20Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
I know someone that worked at some skeezy company in Menlo Park that got passed up for a raise after spending months navigating the bureaucracy to save the company millions on their operating costs because they didn't write enough code. This was in the last four years. Edit: And they quit right afterwards.
It’s better to find ways to make more money than to save it. There’s a floor but no ceiling in much of what we do.