A one-minute clip of Steve Ballmer explaining IBM's obsession with counting thousands of lines of code (KLOCs) as a measure of programmers. He explains why that metric is useless.
Why Hacker News points people here: Linked whenever lines of code or developer productivity metrics are debated.
“Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on useless performance metrics”HN comment, 2020
“Say what you want about Steve Balmer but he had the right attitude towards that”
Ballmer on measuring programmers by lines of code.
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> he didn't feel like they wrote enough lines of code. Say what you want about Steve Balmer but he had the right attitude towards that this video As to the rest, I get the feeling that a lot of players in the market that now need software have the exact same tales being told about them. It is going to be a wonderment to me if I will be about to get through a day in 10 years without a IoT failure.
Cites itben_jonesAug 2016
“LOC value is certainly debatable...”
Ballmer on KLOCs as a metric.
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Steve Ballmer on "KLOCs" [1]. Not saying you're taking that extreme but LOC value is certainly debatable... [1]: this video
Cites itprotomythJan 2018
“the part with Steve Balmer talking about KLOCs is funny and true”
Ballmer on KLOCs from Triumph of the Nerds.
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Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires is his and is pretty good. I must admit that the part with Steve Balmer talking about KLOCs is funny and true this video
Cites itpdkl95Nov 2020
“Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on useless performance metrics”
Ballmer explains IBM's KLOC obsession and why lines of code are useless as a metric.
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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on useless performance metrics[1][2]: >> In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. 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 K-LOCs 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 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. [1] link [2] this video
Cites itFindecanorFeb 2026
“Steve Ballmer on IBM and KLoC's”
Ballmer on IBM's KLOC counting culture.
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If so, it hasn't always been that way. Steve Ballmer on IBM and KLoC's: this video (I think it is from "Triumph of the Nerds" (1996), but I can't find the time code)
