Ever hear of developers getting paid per line of code?

Question

Has anyone ever heard of developers being paid per line of code written?

A friend tells me that many were paid this way in the 60s and early 70s.

I was around then, but have to admit that I've never heard of such a thing.

Answer 1

hah! if so, it should be a negative amount

Answer 2

My goodness. If that ever existed, just imagine how horrible that would be.

We should be implicitly paid to have code be as efficient as possible, not to encourage MORE code!

That's also like being paid to Type...paid by the word.

Just imagine if a novelist were paid by the word, instead of the work!

Answer 3

A friend of mine had performance targets to reach, and the manager decided lines of code would be the best thing to measure. The problem was, it was this year!

Answer 4

Origins of SLOC

At the time that people began using SLOC as a metric, the most commonly used languages, such as FORTRAN and assembler, were line-oriented languages. These languages were developed at the time when punch cards were the main form of data entry for programming. One punch card usually represented one line of code. It was one discrete object that was easily counted. It was the visible output of the programmer so it made sense to managers to count lines of code as a measurement of a programmer's productivity. Today, the most commonly used computer languages allow a lot more leeway for formatting. One line of text no longer necessarily corresponds to one line of code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lines_of_code

Answer 5

I have always proposed one get paid for the lines of code removed.

Answer 6

Not exactly, but I HAVE heard of monitoring of keystrokes as a measure of productivity.

Word is, the developers wrote scripts to simulate keystrokes and up their score!

Answer 7

IIRC, Jon Bentley makes a slightly flippant reference to this in 'Programming Pearls', although I'm not sure if that was a quip or not.

On a more serious note I have seen this being used as a metric a while back even though it should really be used as an inverse metric IMNSHO. I believe Joel mentioned this before, but every performance metric tends to be gamed (especially by geeks) sooner or later and LOC is a particularly bad one to start with.

Answer 8

This isn't about paid lines of code, but it does reflect the value lines of code had:

-2000 Lines of Code

Answer 9

You

owe

me

five

dollars

Answer 10

for (
  int i = 0;
  i < 10;
  i++)
{
  printf(
    "%s\n",
    "this is a stupid metric");
}

Answer 11

If this was the case, Visual Basic would have turned out to be the dominant language of .NET instead of C#... (ducks brick thrown)

-Oisin

Answer 12

It would definitely encourage use of StringBuilder more often for String Concatenation:

Paid by the program @ $5 per program:

Console.Write("Good Morning " + name.ToString() + ", how are you?");

($5 earned)

Paid by the line @ $1 per line:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.Append("Good Morning");
sb.Append(" ");
sb.Append(name.ToString());
sb.Append(", ");
sb.Append("how are you?");
Console.Write(sb.ToString());

($7 earned)

If anyone asks... tell 'em: "Well... duh... Strings are immutable so this way's more efficient. < cheeky grin >

Answer 13

i once, in mid 90's met a customer that was so full of air, (thinking his std-def video capture cards were usefull instead of scanners, or claiming he would wire them with a radar to 'digitize' ship operations...) anyway, he boasted that he'd love to hire me, and pay US$2 per line, "like they all do on developed countries" (i'm peruvian).

he soon retracted when i did the first assignment in 3 days and roughly 960 lines (mostly C code, and some Bison). if he had kept his word, it would be more than i earn monthly today!

i showed him the code, and walked away. glad to never see him again.

Answer 14

@Paul Tomblin

for 
(
int
i
=
0
;
i
<
10
;
i++
)
{
printf
(
"%s\n"
,
"this is a stupid metric"
)
;
}

Answer 15

Actually this would explain a lot about MS Widnows.

Answer 16

aha... and you can make even more money then...

for
(
int
i
=
0
;
i
<
10
;
i
++
)
{
printf
(
"%"
"s"
"\n"
,
"t"
"h"
"i"
"s"
" "
"i"
"s"
" "
"a"
" "
"s"
"t"
"u"
"p"
"i"
"d"
" "
"m"
"e"
't"
"r"
"i"
"c"
)
;
}

Answer 17

One of my developers once asked, jokingly, if he could be paid for lines of code developed. I had told him, also jokingly, that it wouldn't be a problem if he didn't mind taking a pay cut based on his defect rate.

On of the IT Directors at a company I used to work for had mentioned getting paid per-line. Of course, that probably was in the 60's to 70's timeframe and was related to COBOL reports that he was generating.

Answer 18

You all may laugh, but I remember the days when IBM evaluated their developers based on the KLOC's metric (that's thousand lines of code). They didn't necessarily get paid by the line, but that was one of the metrics that they used to determine how productive each developer was being.

This became fairly infamous in the development community for a number of years afterward as the stupidity of it all began to become apparent ... even to the MANAGERS!

I can laugh at it now, but I get a shudder when I think that there are still people who think this is a good idea.

Answer 19

Hmmm, choosing right metric for the coders workload is still not solved problem, yet. Some employers are paying per features, some perfer per hours. I would pay per KBs if there were no such (useful) things as comments and long identifiers.

Answer 20

$ rails webapp

and that's $5,128 please...