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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

When he describes what he does he's describing a 10x engineer. 10x doesn't mean you write 10x more code, it means you deliver 10x more problem solutions

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Unfortunately even the most prolific and very successful CEOs and management in our industry often fail to understand this.

A couple years ago I was rejected from a 3rd round interview for a very large company that should have known better for the primary reason that my "coding challenge" exercise didn't meet an arbitrary lines of code minimum, despite meeting all of their requirements.

And of course we have the recent example of a certain chief Twit firing engineers based on LoC.

> an arbitrary lines of code minimum, despite meeting all of their requirements.

There's no way this is true right? Why would anyone care about LoC for a coding challenge?

Some "old school" management styles measure LoC and make hiring/firing decisions based on that. Really.

Someone should enlighten them that less LOC is good in solving a problem, granted that the code is also more maintenable due to smaller surface area and no bad shortcuts were taken. Yes, it’s hard for management types to get that, perhaps because most of them want the problems entrenchability creates, and that for their own … benefits.

Perhaps tell them the story of the 10x carpenter.

Obviously, the one who uses the most wood wins! ;) If told right, they should easily figure out why LoC is a horrible metric.

Or airplane builder…

I had a recruiter ask me a few days ago, on behalf of the HM, how many lines of code I've written in my career. I told him that's a very weird question, and said nothing else. Needless to say, they're passing on me.

It might have been an estimation task, akin to a Fermi problem.

That's charitable, but leads to a new "how many manhole" questions - how many programmers in NYC will write fizzbuzz on a whiteboard this week?

If fizz buzz took you ten thousand lines, I'd care!

> And of course we have the recent example of a certain chief Twit firing engineers based on LoC.

Is there any evidence of this claim that isn't yellow press and random gossip on Twitter?

No.

When you discount firsthand reports from the people involved, of course there isn't going to be much left.

Some people deliver 10x more code. Good, solid code… more of it and often simply better.

This concept often hurts people’s egos, who search for some counterbalance.

Those must be the mythical 100x programmers.

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