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Steve Balmer on KLOCs

Ali Gajani · 10.7K views · 2014-11-27 · 0:51

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Overview

A one-minute clip of Steve Ballmer explaining IBM's obsession with counting thousands of lines of code (KLOCs) as a measure of programmers. He explains why that metric is useless.

On Hacker News

Linked whenever lines of code or developer productivity metrics are debated.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2016–2026

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What people said

Findecanor · 2026-02 · Reference

If so, it hasn't always been that way. Steve Ballmer on IBM and KLoC's: [VIDEO] (I think it is from "Triumph of the Nerds" (1996), but I can't find the time code)

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pdkl95 · 2020-11 · Reference

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on useless performance metrics[1][2]: >> In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

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protomyth · 2018-01 · Reference

Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires is his and is pretty good. I must admit that the part with Steve Balmer talking about KLOCs is funny and true [VIDEO]

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Video by Ali Gajani, played through YouTube.

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