Developers productivity in US
In his blog, Philip Su - dev manager at MSN Search - gives intersting numbers on the productivity of developers in the USA:
USA 1999 -- 9000 lines of code per year (9 KLOC/year)
USA 2005 -- 6200 lines of code per year (6.2 KLOC/year)
Windows Vista developers -- ~1000 lines per year.
Keep in mind that:
- Many of them spent time maintaining old code (50 millions lines of code in Vista, 40 in XP)
- Many of them worked on 64-bit XP
- Accoding to Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition
) system code is about 9 times harder than app code, so it's about the equivalent of 9KLOCs of app code in addition to (1) and (2).
Anyway, it's interesting how the era of downsizing, budgeting, stalled salaries and all that other stuff in 2000-2003 impacted productivity: from 9 to 6.2 KLOC/year, about 30% less!
I wonder, what are the numbers for Russia, India and China?
PS. If somebody is interested, I did 9 KLOCs in the last 3 months. Although, quantity is not the most important thing anyway, quality is usually the key. Although, seems like I already bragged about it in the previous post.
