Re: Oversight and Programmer productivity

Over the summer of the average student produced 4,000 lines of code
with some students producing as much at 10, 14 and even 20 thousand
lines. This is an insane amount of code written weather you measure by
time or by money. By some measures this means the students are
anywhere between 5 and 40 times as productive as your 'average'
employed programmer. This code, mind you, was written by a student
who is almost always geographically separated from their mentor by at
least 3 time zones and almost never has a face to face meeting with
their mentor.

Ouch. I understand the (elided) paragraphs begging forgiveness for counting lines of code, but...

....can't we simply turn the metric around, and declare that these students _wasted_ 20,000 lines of code on their products?

But, and here's the thing I changed my mind about, is the tradeoff for
silly high productivity that I have to run my projects the way we run
the Summer of Code? Maybe. Can I keep my hands off and let things run
their course? Is the team strong enough to act as this kind of
mentoring to each other? I now think the answer is that yes, they can
run each other better than I can run them. So let's see what letting
go looks like. Ask me next year? Let's hope next years question is
'what chance are you least regretful you took?' and I can talk about
this then!

Exactly. This project is teaching _you_ how to be a boss, and that doesn't mean being a cat herder. A high LOC is a symptom, not a cause, and managing to the symptom is a recipe for disaster. What you resist persists!

--
Phlip
.

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