Thursday, February 5, 2009
In IBM there’s a religion in software that says you have to count KLOCs (pronounced KAY-lock), and a KLOC is a thousand lines of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it’s sort of a 10 KLOC project. This is a 20 KLOCer. And this is 5O KLOCs. 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 KLOCs 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 4 KLOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he’s made something smaller and faster, less KLOCs. KLOCs, KLOCs, that’s the methodology. Ugh!
— Steve Ballmer in 1996, I, Cringely — Microsoft Has PMS - Cringely on technology (I see some parallel to the billable hour in law…) #
