11
Megatron
302d

I was asked this pre-screening question, and also asked again during a screening call:
Have you written over 30K lines of code?
My answer was I probably deleted more than I wrote. They have my CV (12 years of industry exp).
Are they dumb or playing dumb?
Other possible hypothetical answers I came up with:
- 29,999 or 30,001, I’m not sure
- ⁠Do log lines count?
- ⁠I wrote a script that writes code lines straight to production
- ⁠I tend to write a line then do cmd+x, then cmd+z, cmd+shift+z repeatedly

Wdyt? Do you guys have some funny answers?

Comments
  • 4
    Who counts their lines of code?

    30K LOC of Python is way different than 30K LOC in C++. By orders of magnitude.
  • 2
    @Demolishun doesn't everyone tattoo them on their body???
  • 5
    I wrote a script which couts lines of code in the project. Only includes files actually edited by devs.

    It's not a metric in any kind, but I was happy when project reached 1 million ;p

    It's just a fun thing to do. But yes, it should never be a metric.
  • 1
  • 2
    Assuming you were working 200 days per year for 12 years. To get to 30k loc, you would need to write 12,5 loc per day.

    Imagine this kind of productivity 😂
  • 4
    ask them what they're trying to learn by this question
  • 3
    @Lensflare when I used to write really shitty code my line count was much much higher. Now I just write shitty code. So line count is lower.
  • 5
    Not yet, but since I adopted Allmann braces and an 80 character line limit I'm getting there a lot faster.
  • 0
    So I was curious about my current project, which I have coded mostly myself. I used wc to count the lines in all the .cpp and .h files. Which came to about 12K lines. So lets toss out 2K for whitespace. Maybe another 2K for boilerplate. So 8K lines from one project. So 30K seems a low bar. Maybe the test is to find out if they have coded anything. But this is also C++ which is way more verbose than say a scripting language.
  • 2
    I'd have answered "oh, so you're just asking about what I did last month?" ... and, yes, it would clearly be an exaggeration... but you know, there have been months I can think of where I'm not at all sure it wouldn't be true.
  • 0
    I sent 30k requests to github copilot
  • 3
    @Lensflare Last week I spent 3 days to have end result of 5 code lines. That's exactly why it's not a good metric
  • 0
  • 6
    "Did you interview 30k minutes of people?"
  • 1
    @Hazarth this just hurts, but I love the metric.
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