int checkvar;

checkvar = val;

if (checkvar == 0)

{

// do something

}

else if (checkvar == 1)

{

/// do same thing as 0

}

you get the idea… (if this doesn’t show blank lines, imagine there are at least 3 blank lines between each statement)

No man is an island

In most fields the pay spread is not very far apart for salary employees. There’s a reason for this. If the spread is large, the folks at the lower edge of the spectrum get discouraged and productivity lowers more. The folks at the top become more and more expensive partially due to the disparity.

As a result, it’s more cost effective to only single out the poor performers and view the rest as equals.

Sure you’ll loose 1 or 2 of your top performers every so often. But reality is people who perform that well tend to get bored and move on quickly regardless. They won’t stick around no matter how much you pay them.

As a result, money doesn’t get you what you’d want, so why pay?

Awesome post. 100% agree. Thanks.

Or write code for 5 clients, then rework the code for 5 new products to sell B2B.

That said, lines of code do have some relevance: they’re a good tool for weeding out exceptionally low productivity people. “Someone who is 10x more productive than his colleagues is likely to leave,” so it behooves your company to deal with the programmers that write 1/5th the lines of code, or end up having to write the same piece of code 5x, or write code that is 5x longer than necessary. Too much, too frequently, or too little, it takes a coder to know what the hell a coder is really doing.

Since programmer productivity is hard to measure, and companies impose a forced bell-curve evaluation, followed by a rank and yank system, a lot of top skilled programmers start spending less time on being productive and more time on being “visible”, schmoozing etc. Those that cannot do this, or are uncomfortable doing it, will become discouraged and not spend the effort if they are not getting recognition. Or, they will try to move into management thinking that they will get better rewards, with the result that the company loses a good programmer and gets a potentially bad manager.

Compounding the problem are frontline managers who themselves are fighting for their jobs everyday that they cannot spend time evaluating how their directs are doing their jobs. In most companies, a managed doing an excellent job as a people manager is not rewarded for it, unless he also “manages up”, or does his own side projects to show the “extra mile” that he accomplished.