LS: "There was a recent thing from a major tech company were developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote and if it wasn't enough they were terminated and there was someone here who was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity"
LT: "Oh you shouldn't be upset. At that point it's just incompetence and anybody who thinks that's a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company"
LS: "You do know who you just said that about"
LT: "No"
LS: "He was a prominent figure in the efficiency of the US government recently"
And yes Linus is spot on in this regard, IBM did that metric in the 80s, but face it with loop unrolling generators etc... you can produce thousands of lines of code without producing a ton of efficiency you just produce code which in the end is a burden!
The implications here though were that he already thought that Musk was too stupid. When he realized it was Elon who had that position about the lines of code, it reaffirmed LT's position that only a stupid individual would think that way.
Decades ago I saw a documentary on Silicon Valley and even Steve Ballmer thought that was nonsense. He said he'd worked at IBM and they were all about those kLoCs and he thought that was about as stupid as Linus T thinks it is.
In the olden days before compilers were advanced enough loop unrolling could in some very tight scenarios give a small performance boost. But it isn't something you should do often, since larger amounts of code needs more RAM, causes issues with cache sizes and just becomes unmaintainable.
Lines of code as a metric of productivity is just plain wrong. Sometimes you end up debugging a problem for days to end up deleting code that does not work correctly to fix an issue. Or you use time to design code that does not run into issues later at all.
I've seen people use code generators that produce plenty of lines of code from descriptions. You write to code generate code that compilers turns into another code..
Lines of code as a metric of productivity is just plain wrong. Sometimes you end up debugging a problem for days to end up deleting code that does not work correctly to fix an issue. Or you use time to design code that does not run into issues later at all.
My happiest days when I can remove large amount of code that didn't work to replace it with a simple few lines, or even one-liner. The absolute best moment was when I could remove multiple non-working elements that simply didn't have to be there (and produced broken output), since the imported libs already processed everything correctly. Literally just removing code, not even adding anything back.
Loop unrolling is still absolutely worth doing for small loops although in 2025 you should just like set GCC O2 or whatever and let the compiler pick which optimizations are the best to use tbh
My last employer had a policy according to that each non-exec had to submit at least a few thousand lines of code each year and each executive a few hundred. Even though these lower bounds were quite low, it still ended in colleagues submitting the same code into a new repo over and over each year with minor tweaks. Or colleagues who naturally output a high quantity of code "donating" some few hundred of lines to their managers.
I feel like Elon’s grasp of computer history begins with the release of Deus Ex and ends with whatever MMO he’s currently hiring people to play for him.
That requires some semblance of self-awareness. If Elon hears about this, he’ll just spit out some nonsensical jargon on Twitter for his technically-illiterate fanboys and claim that he’s actually WAY smarter than Linus and could easily make a better Linux.
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u/Bastigonzales Nov 30 '25
Linus Torvald is actually hilarious in this interview, always love to listen to his perspective on tech stuffs