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Comment by gernb | Hacker News Reader

Something that came up recenty for me. I took a job at FAANG company and my productivity from my POV sucks! I doubt I've written more than 2k lines of code in 9 months! I'm debugging hardware/driver issues in a giant code base (~250k files) that I don't know and APIs I've not used before.

Conversely, in my own hobby code I wrote ~2k lines in the last 10 days.

It makes me wonder how often 10x is about circumstance vs programmer skill

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the number of lines you write is almost irrelevant. People need to put the equal sign between lines of code written and productivity. Some of the most awesome and productive people I've worked with actually removed more code than they wrote. Code is a liability. There is no code like no code. Focus on the problem not the number of lines of code

I suppose it was my bad for using lines-of-code as a metric. What meant to convey is I feel like I've done the same amount of work in 10 days on hobby projects as 9 months on work projects.

The difference to me is the hobby project is 100% my code and relatively small (25k lines total, 2k lines in last 10 days). Vs the work project which is 1000+ developers, no idea how many lines but at least 250k files.

So, my point is, is it possible that often (not always) 10x programmers are preceived to be 10x because they are in a situation that allows them to be productive (maybe a smaller code base, maybe a code base they are super familiar with, maybe a new project so new code meaning it's their code, no someone else's) etc...

yup. coding in a group setting is harder than coding on your own. Also productivity is whatever you want to make of it. Some people may feel really productive by tweaking a system to squeeze that extra 2% perf, some people may feel productive by writing code, some people may feel productive by enabling others. there is no silver bullet and putting things in perspective always helps :)

Engineering productivity is not measured by LoC but by business outcomes, that's also what the author of the article is arguing about.

I'm not so fond of the phrase "software engineer" in that it's not a hard engineering discipline such as civil engineering. But companies need software developers who think and act like engineers. Engineers in general solve technical problems by applying methodical design, problem solving skills and having technical expertise.

Unless one works in a nonprofit or academic area, engineers are solving business problems for companies. Modern software companies with agile methodologies push engineers close to the business side, allowing them to add the most business value. Of course, many businesses suck at this and treat engineers like factory workers instead of creative individuals.

This varies a lot, depending on whether you're at a 10 person startup or at a FAANG company. Usually if the company has decent management then they have clear expectations of every position. In your case, this could be number of tickets solved or any other metric, but usually not lines of code. At least, I hope. :)

> I've written more than 2k lines of code in 9 months!

I don't find this astonishing at all. That being said, I work in an industry riddled with red tape and debugging. It wouldn't be a shock to me if you wrote less than 200 lines, maybe even less than 20-50.

> It makes me wonder how often 10x is about circumstance vs programmer skill

Often times it is.

Yes, I've written less then 100 lines of "real" code and at most 1900 of tests.

If you’re debugging then it’s not surprising that you’re writing few lines of code, but that kind of work tends to have huge impact for users.

I don't think the original 10x programmer was by measuring lines of code they wrote at all..

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