A simple IDE assisted refactor could inflate your line count by a few thousands.
You can also just write a ton and not actually need it if you’re trying to game the system or if you’re inexperienced.
Commit count would be a little more accurate, but that also is just an analog for who saves the most. It doesn’t really tell you who made any impact with or without code.
Finally, a lot of senior work is just convincing other teams to allow you to do what you’re trying to do. Most code features are trivial to write, but a nightmare to get approved.
> If you're an engineer and made very few code contributions without a solid justification of why, I'd expect you to be on the chopping block...
At a company of Twitter's size you generally expect the junior and mid-level engineers to be writing most of the code and the more senior engineers to be implementing the trickiest bits, managing stakeholders, and writing design docs.
At the extreme end, engineers working to optimize performance might spend months painstakingly optimizing a single hot loop to save the company a few million a year (I've seen this happen).
Given this reality LOC, is so wrong for more senior engineers as to be a waste of time to even consider.
Juniors do most code, seniors less. Those who work on easy tasks produce most code, those who work on hard ones less.
And then there are usually senior positions where producing code is just part of your responsibility - compliance, analysis, negotiation, architecture, operations, troubleshooting shooting.
No. I DO believe lines of code was used as metric. It's a fast way to protect the top code contributors. I just don't think it's the only thing taken into consideration like people are implying...
There are countless teams and examples for it being a horrible metric to solely fire on.
I just think it's not right to jump to conclusions like Dictator Elon fires engineers with low LOC.
All we have to go off of is they had review meetings where they had to show off the code they contributed and Elon "suggested to query for lines committed."
Is believing in both of those things is somehow a contradiction?
"I haven't seen a good proof that he fired based on LOCs and even if he did that would not be stupid anyway"?
Just because you take something into consideration does not mean it becomes a criteria. But I think we can all agree that it would be a mistake in a mass layoff to accidentally fire the top 10 contributors to a given project if the 11th contributor only ever made 3 contributions all just updating comments right?
Well that sort of logic requires you review the logs. It doesn’t have to mean you set up some arbitrary “anyone under ckloc per week is fired”
lmao, and what about teams that focus on, say, security, or privacy, or devops, or numerous other areas that require reading and auditing code/systems, as opposed to writing new code?
I agree. I viewed those as "a solid justification of why". Also, I'd expect there to be some grouping or consideration of job titles and organizations.
No body knows unless real leaks come out. Did they do it strategically? Or by numbers across the board like people are implying?
In these threads, we're all pretending that finding evidence of non-performance in VCS history isn't common practice across the software industry. Because fuck Elon Musk, he's just the worst.
Whether your counting lines changed, number of commits, etc, you can easily catch out the people who do jack shit. Cross reference that metric with their other duties and it is easy to find a lot of slackers. The people who should be coding a lot, but just don't have any work to show.
> Deleting 50k lines of code still counts as lines of code changed...
I'm the most productive 10x software engineer ever: I just fixed CRLF inconsistencies on several large code bases. Literally touched every line on hundreds of files.
Next up: fixing the arbitrarily mixed tabs and spaces.
I just deleted a bit over 76,000 files in one of our repos. GitHub shows it as "Infinity files changed", and refuses to display even a list of the files.
Seems like a form of virtual eugenics, a sensorship or the body in a way that's oppressively homogenizing. I feel like this is part of why zuck leverages cartoons to market metaverse for corporate settings, or why all the retail-safe anodyne pop muzak is full or autotune and flawless software-based overproduction. Not to be overly dramatic but imagine you are enraged but all anyone can see is a tranquil smile and your words replaced by positive endorsement; you have no mouth and you must scream
On the plus side I can see this being used to self-anonymize by individuals who want to protect themselves from facial recognition or other forms of id from undesirable parties, but that's more of a coping tactic for a society that fails to incorporate any honest ethical QC into product development to begin with.
I don't think this is directly more homogenizing than (say) makeup, which has the added property of being cemented by centuries of public presentation and beauty expectations.
That being said, I think there are probably lesser social ills that come from these technologies, ills that we'll have to adapt to. For example, we know that human interaction and emotional feedback are an important part of child development; it's as of yet unclear what effect this will have.
Current example would be the filters that modify appearance that's used a ton on influencer platforms. We've been photo shopping for years but now anyone can create a false identity online. The bad side of this is like catphishing and unrealistic body standards causing non obvious mental health issues across generations.
Future would be continuing to push the boundaries of auto formatting filtering styles based on your preference or the populations preference. Scamming, impersonation, money to be made from gullible people.
This is just the surface. I'm sure there are tons of fictional books exploring this or people with more destructive ideas.
Just because I'm terrified and am listing the bad, that doesn't mean I don't recognize the good that can come from it. I'm not sure if that out weighs the bad yet.
Staring at a filtered, "beautified" version of yourself trying to capture the perfect selfie directly causes facial dysmorphia by making the you in the mirror look ugly compared to the you in the phone display.
I get multiple PayPal requests for money from random throw away accounts with messages ranging from begging for money for something or just phishing invoices like this.
Worst part is that the only option via email is to "Pay". I have to log into PayPal then go through multiple clicks to reject the money request.
Gather town is pretty awesome. My team held a 300 person internal event on that platform. People seemed to really enjoy it. They got a hang of it pretty fast without prior experiences playing games.
I do like the idea of an online proximity focused office space but I couldn't get my team to buy into the idea of it. Async messaging on slack is preferred.
