You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]?

Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.

I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.

[1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...

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malfist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In many many many cases it's not the manager choosing to do that. Its our brilliant job creator class demanding that he does

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jmyeet 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Bad manager: "I have to give you a bad rating because of the company-wide LoC metric."

Good manager (to good engineer): "can you please churn some code to update your LoC metric so I don't have to give you a worse rating?"

I'm sorry but any manager who just claims they're a passive victim of company-wide mandates is a lazy and bad manager.

	▲	lljk_kennedy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Bullshit work, in other words.

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xp84 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LoC can occasionally give you signal. For instance, imagine you are joining a new team or company so you don't know how much oversight your predecessor did. If you ask an engineer how they spend most of their time and they say "Mostly just writing code" and you look at GitHub and it says they've made 3 minor commits in the past quarter, that person is lying and your predecessor was incompetent (quite possibly both of them have been MIA from their responsibilities for months).

No, I'm not talking about the engineer who can point to significant contributions outside of code: writing technical specs, leading architecture discussions, etc. I'm talking about the ones who just say they're just coding, but are actually not working at all.

TL;DR LoC and commit count etc can be used only to flag for review likely cases of quiet quitting.