Yes, that is a metric that gets lost in the morass and confusion of many-a-business. If you’ve been in failed tech startups, then you know what the heck I’m talking about first hand. Now if you’ve been a part of some successful ones, you’d know there is a flip side to that. Having at least a general gut sense of the metric here will lead to gold. It is often labeled as a useless metric by the programming community and has even had a history of managers who’ve used it religiously in the 70s.
I count myself lucky because for the past 5 years….almost every line of code that I’ve written has had a positive net revenue generated back to whatever cause or business that was worked on. I switched from java to python programming about two years ago after finding out that coding in python felt extremely fluid and ‘crankable’. And in the past two years now I think i’ve written over 150,000 lines of code just for my own company pet projects. And if I calculated the rev generated per line….it would definitely be over 2 euro on the low end. This is the power of internet applications. Web applications that make money. Not code written for a hardware product to be sold on a unit basis.
Rev generated is not how much a developer gets paid per hour by a company that they are working at. I’m looking at the actual revenue generated by the act of running the code which was written. If you have coded a web app to sit out there as a facebook copycat but with only a smidgen of users and no revenue streams, yeah….each line of code there has generated negative net revenue. My recommendation is to get out of there and find a place to write some rev generating code. Coding is like movie script writing….choose what you focus on wisely.
If you own a tech company, try to keep track of this metric as a simple exercise. Ask your VP or Director of Technology what it is… if you don’t have a feel for it yourself. Just please refrain from acting like it’s none of your business by sticking your head in the sand like it is cool. And don’t lett them give you that classic answer that it is a useless metric. Metrics are metrics. Telltales of what is going on. If your head is in the sand on this one, I’d bet vegas odds that you’re burning cash.
Assuming your business model is not disruptive technology production/R&D and you’re not at day one of starting a company, the other business units will need to contribute even more than your technical units typically. So take a look at what’s really wagging the tail.
I don’t mean to lecture here. Just very adamant about this topic.
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