It’s absolutely a useful metric. I have managed many developers who insist their low LOC is in no way indicative of their productivity. They’ll say others are padding their code with comments, or writing bloated inefficient code, or that they themselves were tackling very tough problems that result in small (but tricky) fixes. Yes, we’ve all encountered that killer deadlock or memory leak deep in the runtime that takes three weeks to debug and then it’s a 2-line fix. But some people pretend that’s how all their work is, when in reality they take a week to fix a css misalignment, or take a week to refactor some simple python script and add one new command-line argument, and they average 50 LOC or whatever.
