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A comment on -2000 Lines of Code. Parent comment

Re:-2000 Lines of Code by jrochkind1 on Monday March 08, 2021 @03:15PM (#26390890)
It gets even worse, the metric can harm. As suggested in the OP, if the number of lines of code you wrote was supposed to show your productivity, programmers will start optimizing for maximizing lines of code, which will make their code worse.

Goodhart's law rephrased by Marilyn Strathern: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

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Re:-2000 Lines of Code by beaconstudios on Monday March 08, 2021 @03:19PM (#26390951)
Yes precisely this, because you close your feedback loop not over the actual result you wish to achieve, but a crude numerical reduction which probably won't correct your actions effectively (as per your example, optimising for lines written rather than features shipped).
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