[LINK] Coding, and staff turnover

[Ivan Trundle]

Linkers

I know this has been discussed in the past (and sometimes not so  
reverentially), but I came across a little snippet on a Microsoft  
blog referring to how many lines of code there are there in the  
version of Mac Office under development.

About 30,000,000 was the answer. Okay, fair enough - it's Microsoft,  
and with any app, some lines might only have a few characters, and  
many of the lines will be in libraries that don't change much.

But go deeper - the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) houses a number  
of developers, but not nearly as many as the rest of Microsoft.  
Consequently, each developer is responsible for around 428,000 lines  
of code (and compare this with Windows Office at your peril).

So each developer is responsible for around a 10,700-page book (if it  
were a regular paperback, it would be around 35 paperback).

The blog went on to describe the average lifetime of code - about 12  
years - which means that most of the code was written back when 386's  
and 68k ruled the world. He then described the average life-cycle of  
MacBU developers - a turnover of 50% in the last two years. So all of  
these new people have to learn 400,000 lines of code, much of which  
was written long before they finished their computing studies. Most  
won't have had any previous experience with the code being built at all.

The reasons given for the high turnover of staff are primarily the  
shift to using Mach-O, and junior staff eventually climbing the  
corporate ladder.

Makes you sit down and think about what companies like Microsoft face  
(and all other large developers, too).

iT