Zero code situation is wishful thinking - poster just made it up.

Perhaps an awful lot of people were just working on a stealth no code project.

> wishful thinking

I have no stake in the matter. My supposition that some employees simply stopped working comes from my experience seeing similar things happen at other companies during periods of uncertainty, and from my knowledge that quite a few twitter employees were very uncertain about their future with twitter.

There are people on my team that haven’t committed anything for a couple weeks. I don’t work at Twitter, but wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who basically weren’t working.

I spent the last month prototyping code for a demo that will not be checked in. I have a few small unrelated CLs submitted (minor fixes) but I spent 5 minutes per each, my main work for the month is completely unaccounted for in version control.

Should I be fired?

Yeah your shoddy practices are certainly suspect. Why aren't you using version control to checkpoint your prototype?

For your own sake, you should probably check that demo code in somewhere. Keeping a 'paper' trail of the work you've done is always a good practice to follow.

The true big brain 10x programmer is pushing -100 lines of code per sprint.

I sort of think of the absolute value of lines changed as a pulse.

You can do -100. You can do 100. You can net zero from 100 adds and 100 subtracts (abs=200). But it’s something. If you have long stretches of zero that’s not good.

The true big brained programmer sat in a meeting and prevented a team of 25 people from wasting 6 months.

Sure. That’s super valuable.

But I hope they have something productive to show for the other 20 odd days that month they collected their paycheque for…

At a previous job I had a few months where I managed approximately minus‐1 instruction per week — and it was the best money the company ever spent. Hard constraints are hard.

Sure. But a code review of their checkins will reveal their productivity pretty quick. Any one claiming 10x (or even 0.75x) productivity would want some very good supporting evidence if they have zero activity in the source control for a month. You want some great specification documents or API documentation or platform architecture diagrams or something…

In case this wasn't clear, when I say "no code" I mean no commits, nothing they can point to as evidence of doing any work. Afaic, commits removing code count for at least as much as those adding code. And if they've spent the past month adding documentation to the intranet wiki or something like that, there should be logs they can show to prove it.

is code the only output of an engineer?

not everything is committed in a VCS: you have documentation, architecture, RFC etc etc depending on the size of the company and seniority of the employee.

That stuff is typically in a VCS.

I don’t think it’s an absolute rule that no commits means someone isn’t developing. But it’s probably a reason to have a conversation.