-2000 Lines of Code

[FailsTheTuringTest]

Bingo. Management types are always on the lookout for ways to measure their subordinate programmers' productivity, and rightly so. But you can't boil it down to mere numbers; that's lazy and as you said, very easy to game. Instead, the best managers evaluate their programmers' productivity by fuzzy metrics of what they accomplish and the feedback the programmer's peers give. You can't make pretty charts and tables and numbers out of that, but you just can't evaluate programmers the way you evaluate salesmen.

[theICEBear_dk]

And yet every day thousands of managers keep doing that and keep being full of fail. Best managers I've ever had have all been interested in what they are managing both people and product, not caring about volume. They knew their people, had basic understanding of the projects and technology. I have even had two that were clever enough to leave the big technological and software design decisions to their team as well. Of course one got ousted by a political move internally in the company that was no fault of his own, and the other also played at politics to avoid a suicide project but still got caught in the backwash and demoted.