Why would anyone subject themselves to such humiliation? (Well, a fat paycheck is probably an answer). It feels more like a weeding-out process, if I were a giant jerkoff billionaire, I would know anyone who submits to this bullshit will submit to further humiliation...
It's humiliating because printing out code (or more commonly "printing out emails") is literally a meme, and I have read multiple articles alleging that after printing, the employees were instructed to shred the papers, without anyone having looked at them. That sounds a lot like Musk trolling by demanding his underlings print their code.
I think the implication was that they asked everyone to print the code out and then, realizing that nobody actually would be able to evaluate the code, asked everyone to shred the printouts lest they go into a dumpster where the code could be stolen.
To make the example extreme, if you got hired to be a developer, and your boss asks you to clean the toilets, is it okay because hey, he's paying for you to do whatever he wants?
You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is over my line.
It's apprarently fairly common for office workers in Japan to clean toilets of their offices. They see as part of taking care of their surroundings (something they perceive as required for harmonious functioning as a human) and not at all beneath them. It starts in elementary schools, where children clean up the school themselves.
Haven't experienced exactly that but I often did non-coding tasks:
- lunch shopping and preparations, clean up
- transport from one branch to another for Factory Acceptance Testing
- at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure everything went into the dishwasher
If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50 printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job, hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that company...
That’s kind of like the complaints about Body Mass Index (BMI), “Well it misrepresents body builders and says world-class professional athletes are obese!” Yes, but are you a body builder or world-class professional athlete?
Everybody wants to think they’re Andy Hertzfeld, but generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
> for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the thing you might actually care about - business value - under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can figure it out himself.
My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you had, the action items from those meetings, and what changed as a result. Nearly every job’s productivity can be showed in a pretty simple way. It’s the people who argue that their contribution can’t be simply shown that are often not that productive.
> My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition.
This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his given argument when we challenged him on this was that he "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set to private" (yes really his defence was that bad).
Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this method" comments to the original, because the original was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class duplicated all of these too.
So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good additions.
If anything that guy’s a great example of why to use LOC as a metric because when he shows you a huge number of LOC, you say, “That’s a lot more than I expected, let’s take a look…” and you see that his performance sucks.
I think of metrics like this as a way to guide deeper looks and decision making. You just have to accept that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” LOC can be useful when it guides you to the right questions. It’s a starting point not the end of the conversation.
