If you type faster you get more LOC. If you slack off all day you get zero.
It does measure something, not necessary something useful but zero LOC indicates trouble.
It does measure something, not necessary something useful but zero LOC indicates trouble.
If you work insanely hard solving a problem, you often end up with 0 loc + an incredible amount of understanding. If you slack off all day then spend an hour writing a bunch of sloppy code, you have way more loc than someone who worked all day to refine some simple clear performant code (which is then read 500 times before it's changed, hence the time is earned back with interest).
These scenarios don't have to happen for the disincentive to still affect the work people do; there's a continuous problem from the baseline to these extremes.
It may indicate an employee with nothing to do, but in that situation would you prefer the employee did nothing, or started destroying the code base by adding KLOC of garbage to keep their manager happy and unsuspecting ?
I’ve got to admit, I found this kind of _frustrating_ at the time, but if I’d insisted on writing something, anything, from the get-go, it would have been a complete disaster, and no-one would have thanked me for it.
and that ideal manager has a much better and multidimensional idea of performance over time than commit rate.
the platonic ideal of manager isn't some kind of school marm whose primary concern is figuring out when people are slacking off
Agreed, and this includes managers reaching out to their reports.
> I fail to understand this model where 'blockers' are some kind of hidden disease that a manger needs to actively ferret out.
You're imputing an attitude to me which I neither hold nor intended to convey.
> in healthy organizations I've worked in..the whole notion of a blocker doesn't really exist.
Weird. The idea that a step in a process can't be completed before another step seems bedrock to me. It's always good to eliminate these dependencies when one can, but that isn't always possible.
> the platonic ideal of manager isn't some kind of school marm whose primary concern is figuring out when people are slacking off
Considering that should be obvious, since an ideal doesn't have negative qualities, I'm forced to conclude you're responding to a bunch of things I didn't say.