Or maybe they aren't pushing flaky shit into prod and actually thinking about their work. Maybe they did 1k lines (counting lines LOL!) of code reviews, fixed some bugs, helped on an outage etc. Fuck. This one dimensional view of things. Look how any company makes money. Let's say Google. It is not by the number of lines of code.

I don't know how many engineers and different engineering teams you've worked with. But I see this all the time.

I worked once with a young engineer that spent 3 weeks for 2 lines of code. We celebrated him as a fucking superstar, because those 2 lines were in a low-level linux library, and he went so deep to find that bug, it was insane. He earned the reputation as one of the top problem-solvers in a multi-hundred person org.

So that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the developers (so many of them) who spend 2+ weeks in standups saying they're "working on automating the deployment", and when it's done you look at their code, and it's an argparse block followed by 6 lines of calling docker with trivial parameters. You've seriously never seen this? Lucky you, then.

So, you think productivity or even quality can be measured in "amount of lines of code produced".

Which is completely wrong.

When a developer takes weeks to come up with trivial code, they are not productive.

I understand that complex problems can (should) be solved with simple code. That's not what I'm talking about.

Simple problems should be solved with simple code, and good developers do this quickly. If someone takes 3 days to figure out how to make a one-line REST api to a well-documented service, they are not productive.

Maybe I just unfairly expect developers at top companies to be able to not get stuck at every step and to not get confused by basic programming. I probably just need to recalibrate and understand that what I consider to be slow developers (certainly by comparison to the many excellent people I've worked with), are actually the norm, and I should just be OK with that.