The productivity of programmers in an institution varies by a factor of infinity. It is hard to ensure that a programmer is in fact doing any useful work, and people in general are clever enough to come up with ways to avoid work while retaining the pay. Consequently there’s the people who don’t do anything, or do absolute bare minimum which is often counter productive. The very difficulty in measuring productivity inevitably (humans trying to conserve their effort) leads to immense variability in productivity.
Resulting in average of say 3 lines of code per day and majority of projects failing. We can all agree that for all but the most analysis & verification—heavy software, 3 lines of code per day per programmer is crap (and this includes lines such as lone “{” ), and there is no counter argument that it in fact works, with the huge (unseen) fraction of projects failing to deliver anything, and having the productivity of 0 lines of code that’s of any use. The lines of code are awful metric. They are still good enough to see several orders of magnitude issues.
The productivity of programmers in an institution varies by a factor of infinity. It is hard to ensure that a programmer is in fact doing any useful work, and people in general are clever enough to come up with ways to avoid work while retaining the pay. Consequently there’s the people who don’t do anything, or do absolute bare minimum which is often counter productive. The very difficulty in measuring productivity inevitably (humans trying to conserve their effort) leads to immense variability in productivity.
Resulting in average of say 3 lines of code per day and majority of projects failing. We can all agree that for all but the most analysis & verification—heavy software, 3 lines of code per day per programmer is crap (and this includes lines such as lone “{” ), and there is no counter argument that it in fact works, with the huge (unseen) fraction of projects failing to deliver anything, and having the productivity of 0 lines of code that’s of any use. The lines of code are awful metric. They are still good enough to see several orders of magnitude issues.
And also leads to difficulty of talented new people getting started; I read a very interesting experimental economics paper using oDesk on this yesterday: http://www.onlinelabor.blogspot.com/2012/02/economics-of-cold-start-problem-in.html