What if I produced only 30 lines of code and removed 1950 lines of code?
Please take my argument in good faith: I am not looking at evaluating people based on their added LOC. The context is at orgs where I have reason to believe some people are slacking off, and looking for people who do next to nothing.
That's much more common than people who magically make everyone more effective by only deleting code.
Depends on the size and age of the company. In a startup, approximately never since the job is to build something out of nothing.
In a large enterprise with decades of codebase history to be optimized, very frequently.
I did say I wrote 30 lines of code, which was reusing other code instead of copy-pasting and changing a few things
For sure there may be a thousand good reasons for it, but as a quick heuristic for 'who is worth having a quick check to see if we're getting the value out of them that we're paying them for?', I don't think it's irrational.
It's not because the ratio is bad - if you wrote 300 and removed 19500 that might be fine. It's just that 30 is, in an absolute sense, too low.
The number of lines removed I don't remember and it changes nothing about the effort to read and understand the whole codebase
That's more lines of code than https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/