Programmers write 325-750 lines of code per month.

That’s Capers Jones, an American specialist in software engineering methodologies. He examined 12,000 software projects and made two surprising discoveries:

1. Programmers write 325-750 lines of code per month.
2. The choice of programming language doesn’t influence that number.

How does that play out in real life? Let’s say Alice and Bob are both asked to write a very simple web app that displays the number of widgets in stock in a warehouse. The number is stored in a database; all you have to do is display it to the user on a web page. Alice chooses a low-level language and Bob chooses a high-level language.

Alice’s status report one month into the project:

It went well. I wrote and tested about 500 lines of low-level code. The code initializes a connection to the database. By the end of next month, I might be able to send a query to the database. I’m devoting month 3 to reading the result from the database. In the following months I will write the code to display the result on the web page. Will be done in 6 months, 7 tops!

Because I’m using an efficient low-level language, I expect my code (when done) to display the number to the user within 0.01 seconds!

Bob’s status report one month into the project:

It went well. I wrote and tested about 500 lines of high-level code. My code displays the number to the user within one second. The project is done.

Who do you think will be hired for the next project, Alice or Bob?