I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.

Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.

1 - https://archive.org/details/programmingprodu0000jone/page/n1...

The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy

While it is good story for illustrating perverse incentives, there is no good historical evidence that the cobra bounty program actually existed.

why?

>This article is about statistics and government policy. For Nazi analogies in internet discussions, see Godwin's law.