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Comment by shric | Hacker News Reader

> Q: What do you mean by stack-ranking engineers? What were the criteria?

> A: Raw number of lines of code over a certain period (a year I think)

Wow.

Genuinely incredible this happened in 2022. Holy shit. Which shitty manager was responsible for this a performance metric at Twitter? Should have been the first on the chopping block.

You’re kidding right? The rumors are Elon and co were responsible. So not on the chopping block.

Have a citation? I understand Elon isn’t the most popular figure here but my sense is this is adding fuel to fire and should be backed up.

Firstly: please note that companies have no obligation to reveal this information, and therefore will not.

Secondly: If a manager under Musk made this decision, Musk is responsible as well, unless he renounces it and holds the people who made this decision accountable.

There were lots of reports that Elon asked people to print out code and bring it to Tesla engineers for review. They’re Rumors and pretty easy to find. Wrapped up in the whirlwind of news from the last 24 hours was that LOC was a metric used. Also rumored was that Elon asked that his name not be included on any negative memo (presumably out of negative publicity?).

So no I can’t get a citation, and everything is rumors but they’re laying off 3500 people so prepare for lots of rumors floating around.

I worked at a zombie startup in the early 2000's. One of the "managers" was in charge of tracking engineer performance. He would look at the number of lines added or modified. We were using CVS at the time. One guy would just add or remove white space to get his count up. Eventually this manager was laid off.

It definitely still happens; one group I recently worked in at Google used LOC and CL (pull requests) counts as a metric during calibration. One engineer I worked with got his code review count up by becoming a well-known rubber stamp, and was publicly rewarded for it. Entirely predictable results followed.

Clever way of earning more money. What a stupid metric.

Elon bans Kanban and the Toyota Production System at his car company so you shouldn't be surprised about dinosaur mentalities...

Well it depends. If let’s say you wrote 50 lines of code the entire year and your title is software engineer then I think some questions should be raised.

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