Hey man, I once had an engineering exec (who didn’t last very long) who decided engineers would be stack ranked by SLOC. You can imagine how easy that metric was to cheese, and you can also imagine exactly how that policy turned out.

Give an engineer a stupid metric to meet, and they’ll find a stupid way to meet it for you, if only out of malicious compliance.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I'd have a field day with that. Max line length 70 or 75, excessively verbose function and variable names, triple the normal amount of comments, extra whitespace wherever possible, tab width 8, etc. The possibilities are endless for that metric.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Dude... Just write a python script that makes small changes to white space every few seconds and commits them.

[–] towerful 3 points 4 months ago

When metrics become targets they fail to be metrics any more

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Campbell's law goes brrrrr.