The postoffice horizon scandal in the UK has put the spotlight on the coding practices of Fujitsu.

With the publishing of some code snippets, several people who have looked at it have replied "Wow, are they paid by the line of code?"

Which, while often meant as a joke, has some basis in history, and it opens up the discussion, of how do you incentivise programmers and how do you judge their achievements for the basis of bonues?

It's thread time.

1/n

In the past shortly after programming went from being considered women's work, to being considered men's work (see my thread about thread, and how weaving changed from women's to men's work). Management found themselves with the problem of how to judge the performance of their programmers. You can judge a brick layers performance by the number of bricks layed, a rivet maker by the number of rivets. What's the output of a programmer? It's line's of code.

2/n

So for a short time you'd get people paid based on the number of lines of code written. Thus rather than a one line for loop such as for(i=0; i<10; i++) dosomething();, you right out do something() ten times, thus your lines of code output is higher, your pay higher. Everyone's happy. Right?

Ye gods no, you end up with write once code that's a fucking nightmare to debug.

Fortunately such practices didn't last very long. Generally.

But the problem remains. How do you judge performance?

3/n

@quixoticgeek

Also, instead of using a DB for the zip codes, store them as variables, so you have one or more line for every town.

@GustavinoBevilacqua Ouch, that hurts.