I’ve had to explain this to more executives than I wish to remember. Computer code is a recipe, not a cake. When you see a recipe that’s super long, and requires two kitchens worth of bakeware and tools, you probably think it’s a bad recipe. Short, elegant, easy to follow recipes with a little note in the margin from your grandmother about what to do when the dough is too sticky are the best recipes.

Unfortunately, one learned the exact wrong lesson from this, and started measuring lower lines of code produced as better… Which worked for a while, but lead to a lot of weirdness around new features for no particular reason.