I remember being asked how many words per minute I could type, in a programmer/analyst job interview. I was greatly surprised by the question. Are you hiring a programmer or an office assistant? It turns out that this ‘house’ never did really needed programmers. They were hiring people to go on customers’ sites and ‘type’ some updates into their software at high ‘programmer’ rates.
That job was pretty boring. The most fun I had was handling support for customers. I endured that situation because I needed something to do between contracts elsewhere.
On another contract a few years later, I produced about 30000 lines of C code (Informix esql/c) in about 2 months. I did not type faster, I just used some common sense to reuse the same code. The first ‘templates’ took longer to write because the end goal was to be able to reproduce the code.
>>> “It might seem a reasonable question, but it makes some terrible assumptions:
lines of code = effort
lines of code = value
all lines of code are equal “
www.mrlacey.com/2020/07/youve-only-added-two-lines-why-did-that.html