that can't be healthy.

[solipsistnation]

from http://jobs.perl.org/job/1862:

PERL/VBA Programmer

Posted: 	October 7, 2004
Company name: 	Alltech Consulting Services, Inc.
Internal ID: 	12345
Location: 	United States, NJ, Princeton
Pay rate: 	$400-440/Day DOE
Travel: 	0%
Poster represents: 	a recruiting agency
Terms of employment: 	Independent contractor (hourly)
Length of employment: 	3+ months
Hours: 	Full time
Onsite: 	yes
Description: 	Required Experience:

Developer with extensive knowledge of PERL and ability to code 7.5K to10K lines per day.

Knowledge of VBA and Equity markets and products

...ouch.

Comments

7.5-10k lines a day?!?

[gonecaving.livejournal.com]

Well I suppose they don't specify that those lines have to be working :-/

Re: 7.5-10k lines a day?!?

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Keep typing! You've got another four thousand lines before we let you leave!

And there better not be any BUGS in there, y'hear?

Re: 7.5-10k lines a day?!?

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

If one is in this situation, writing a code generator is surely the way forward. My last code generator happily generates fifteen thousand lines of database abstraction layer and GUI code from the system's schema. And I can design schemas of that size at the rate of one a day.

[kittenexploring.livejournal.com]

You just need to use cut and paste a lot. None of this iteration business.
x=1;
Do lots of stuff based on x;
x=2;
Do lots of stuff based on x;

[twwombat.livejournal.com]

So, like, =blank= lines are still technically lines, right?

I can write that many words in a day, but working code? Yeesh!

[jon3.livejournal.com]

It must be like 750-1000. I mean, just TYPING 7,500-10,000 lines a day would take quite a long time.

60 words per minute is generally accepted to be 3.2 lines per minute, or 3125 minutes per day, or 52 hours per day.

Lets pretend you are a perl god, and never make any mistakes ever. Also that you have a new and improved keyboard that will allow you to type that fast without overflowing the buffers. And that you don't eat, sleep, or pee.

There are 1440 minutes per day. You'll have to type about 6.94 lines per miute, or about 130 words per minute. So the job req is looking for somebody who is a perl god, does not need to pee/eat/sleep/ever leave work/ever make mistakes and can type faster than every other human on the planet.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Haw, you just have to write a short script to generate code.

while (1) {

writecode();

}

[mindways]

That was my first thought - write a method that, given a line of code and N, creates N lines of code to accomplish what the provided code would do. (So writecode("lemons = apples + pears", 2000) would generate 2,000 lines of code, the net upshot of which would be that lemons gets the result of apples + pears.)

This way, you could meet the coding requirements *and* generate code that worked! (Say, one line per day, with the rest of your time spent on upgrading the code generator to new heights of obfuscatory glee.)

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

Isn't the productivity of the average programmer supposed to be ten lines a day? I was averaging 250 lines a day on my last large project, even amortising over analysis, design, testing and documentation.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Wow, they don't want much, do they?

[eccles.livejournal.com]

How
long
is
a
line
or
rather
how
short
is
a
line
?

[sirroxton.livejournal.com]

Ugh, if your program has to be 10k+ lines long, then neither Perl nor VBA can possibly be the right tool.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Why? Perl is as good as any other language (and better than most).

10,000 line programs may simply be complex. There is no real difference between "a scripting language" and "a programming language" aside from perceptions.

It's true that there may be better ways to do things, but the language is seldom to blame for that.

[sirroxton.livejournal.com]

I was going to center my critique around the difficulty of adapting Perl modules to modern enterprise architectures, but I did a little homework and discovered that there's a lot more there than I first thought.

I'm going to stick my hands in my pockets, rock on my toes, and shut the hell up now.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

I'm filing this in the same category as the job offers that require "fifteen years of Java experience" and so on.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Maybe they meant 7.5 to 10 kilobytes of new code per day and "lines" was inadvertently left in as an artifact from a previous draft of the job description where the requirement was expressed in lines. How many lines would that be? I know I can knock out 10 K of text without much difficulty at all...