Bell curve of IQ vs lines of code: productivity paradox meme
Description
The image shows a classic statistical bell curve (blue fill, grey outline) labelled “IQ score” along the x-axis, with tick marks at 55, 70, 85, 100, 115, 130, 145, 160, 175 and 190 and shaded percentage bands (34 %, 34 %, 14 %, 2 %, 0.1 %, 0.01 %) indicated above the curve. Four internet-meme caricatures are positioned at different points: far left a simple wide-eyed head with the caption “2 lines per hour”; at the mean a nerdy character with glasses, braces and undercut hair captioned “45 lines per hour”; at roughly 140 IQ a hooded hacker figure captioned “2 lines per hour”; and at the extreme right a galaxy-brain cube head captioned “-2 lines per hour”. The joke contrasts raw line-count metrics with developer maturity - implying that both novice and elite engineers write (or even remove) very few lines, while average programmers churn out many. It satirises the flawed use of “lines per hour” as a productivity KPI, highlighting code quality, refactoring and the fallacy that more code equals more value
Comments
13Comment deleted
Management keeps celebrating positive LOC, but our smartest commit last quarter was - 2,837: one PR that deleted the entire hand-rolled scheduler we replaced with cron
The best code review I ever did was rejecting a 2000-line PR and approving the 50-line rewrite that replaced it six months later - same developer, just after they discovered the standard library had that functionality all along
The most enlightened senior engineers understand that their greatest contribution isn't the 10,000 lines they wrote, but the 50,000 lines they prevented from being written - or better yet, the legacy monstrosity they refactored down to 200 lines of elegant, maintainable code. Negative LOC velocity is the true measure of architectural maturity
Make LOC/hour the KPI and the senior optimizes by pushing negative diffs - git revert as a service
Senior velocity is measured in -LOC/hour - the day you delete a microservice and the system gets faster, your KPI thinks you underperformed
Left tail at 2 LOC/hour: juniors copy-pasting SO. Right tail: seniors wielding delete like a scalpel
1 dev meme per hour Comment deleted
bruh i made a simmilar meme format myself a couple of months before this is a local meme btw Comment deleted
your x-axis is fucked up Comment deleted
I know a person who worked at Mozilla before "the restructuring" who was pretty proud of his negative LOC contribution. Comment deleted
I think they count absolute difference anyways Comment deleted
yes Comment deleted
I like deleting dead code. Am I a code coroner? Comment deleted