Can confirm it’s a shitty metric. I once saved the company I was working at few millions by changing one line of code. And it took 3 days to find it. And it was only 3 characters changed.
That’s the curse and blessing of our profession: efficiency of work is almost impossible to measure once you go beyond very simple code.
You can feel like a hero for changing three characters and finally fixing that nasty, or you can feel like an absolute disgrace for needing days to find such a simple fix. Your manager employs the same duality of judgement
I feel like a hero in this particular case, it was a bug in a code that was written when I was still too young to even read. And no one knew how to run it. We didn’t have access to the pipelines so no one knew how to build it and how to run it. It was a very obscure hybrid of C and PHP. I basically had to be the compiler, I went line by line through the whole codebase, searching for the code path that caused the error. Sounds easy enough, right? Just CTRL+click in your IDE. Wouldn’t it be a shame if someone decided that function names should be constructed as a string using at least 20 levels of nesting where each layer adda something to the function name and then it’s finally called. TL;DR it was a very shitty code.
Can confirm it’s a shitty metric. I once saved the company I was working at few millions by changing one line of code. And it took 3 days to find it. And it was only 3 characters changed.
That’s the curse and blessing of our profession: efficiency of work is almost impossible to measure once you go beyond very simple code.
You can feel like a hero for changing three characters and finally fixing that nasty, or you can feel like an absolute disgrace for needing days to find such a simple fix. Your manager employs the same duality of judgement
I feel like a hero in this particular case, it was a bug in a code that was written when I was still too young to even read. And no one knew how to run it. We didn’t have access to the pipelines so no one knew how to build it and how to run it. It was a very obscure hybrid of C and PHP. I basically had to be the compiler, I went line by line through the whole codebase, searching for the code path that caused the error. Sounds easy enough, right? Just CTRL+click in your IDE. Wouldn’t it be a shame if someone decided that function names should be constructed as a string using at least 20 levels of nesting where each layer adda something to the function name and then it’s finally called. TL;DR it was a very shitty code.
What the fuck. I’m so appalled I had to leave this useless comment to digitally stare with an agape mouth.
To be fair, they said I’ll be dealing with legacy code from time to time during the interview.
Theres an ancient Apple story about how LoC is a stupid metric from when they were programming the Lisa.
But did you add 3 characters? Gotta bump up that code count bruh.
Nope, removed 3, added 1.
-2 on your paycheck!