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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking for the kind of job where I can stare out the window all day long, but then write one single subroutine that just works the very first time, and that not only is compliant to spec, but exceeds expectation.

Rock stars blow their royalties and ticket sales up their noses, sleep with groupies, trash hotel rooms and die young.

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Rock stars are statistically more likely to end up dead in a hotel bathtub.

Ninjas spend 99% of their time practicing, but when they do work, you never see them. And you know them by their trail of bodies.

Neither of these sound like successful software developer case studies.

back in the day, some clueless manager posted to usenet that he was looking for a coder who could - I swear I'm not making this up! - "write 1000 lines of code per day".

I'm sure you can visualize all the responses that were posted.

There are some days (like today) where this is the norm at my company...

I started on my current project 10 months ago, and using gitinspector [1], I can see I've averaged 10k lines a month, but after deletions and refactors, about 40% of that remains. This is working on a green field project and never exceeding 40 hours a week. It's also 'losing' coding time to research (I'm a junior dev) and managing / training other team members. So I could see a much higher number of lines than this being feasible.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/gitinspector/

Now, if they could average minus 1000 lines per day ...

Yes, for almost every existing project I've ever worked on, I had a net negative line of code count per day, and boy did that feel good.

Clearly they were looking for this guy: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Got_Time_0x3f_

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