- patents written / rewritten / meetings with lawyers / issued
- mentoring of other engineers
- PRs reviewed
- talks given
- meetings attended
- RFCs / ADRs written
- customer calls attended
- quality of code (the original and best reason that LOC is bad.)
Et cetera, et cetera
If you are truly an engineering manager, unless all your direct reports are fairly junior, I sincerely hope you realize soon that LOC is a pretty terrible measure of engineer contribution.
I am old enough to remember when the industry finally came around to accepting LOC is a worthless measure of engineer productivity in the late 90s. I am not exactly shocked but dismayed that this conversation needs to be rehashed.
Number of tasks closed is a better measure than LOC and it is still a terrible measure.
They shouldn’t just “accept it”. They shouldn’t care at all!
Equivalent would be saying “our sales rep only said 2300 words today but that is ok, we can accept it he was visiting an old customer not cold calling like the juniors”
- patents written / rewritten / meetings with lawyers / issued - mentoring of other engineers - PRs reviewed - talks given - meetings attended - RFCs / ADRs written - customer calls attended - quality of code (the original and best reason that LOC is bad.)
Et cetera, et cetera
If you are truly an engineering manager, unless all your direct reports are fairly junior, I sincerely hope you realize soon that LOC is a pretty terrible measure of engineer contribution.
I am old enough to remember when the industry finally came around to accepting LOC is a worthless measure of engineer productivity in the late 90s. I am not exactly shocked but dismayed that this conversation needs to be rehashed.
Number of tasks closed is a better measure than LOC and it is still a terrible measure.