At 4:30 PM +0100 10/8/10, Nathan Rixham wrote:
tedd wrote:
Now, back to the question at hand -- what price would you sell a
line of your code for?
Interesting case and question Tedd! Quite sure we all realise the
answer is not black and white but various shades of grey, and I
wouldn't fancy doing this for real - however, given the assumption
that it was technically solid code "average", and assuming it was a
functional approach (as in there wasn't chunks of domain schema
classes with nothing but getters and setters around / boiler plate
junk), then:
35-40 cents per line
The approach I've taken to working it out is to try and average out
lines of code produced per 8 hour working day, allowing time for
research, decision making, minor code reduction and refactoring,
then adding a small offset for any time spend on documentation which
would show further understanding and confidence in the code + make
it more usable. Whitespace and a coding styles which produce more
lines but the same amount of code not included. I've also made a
small adjustment for the 'several years ago' all though I'm assuming
this to be early 2000s and not the 1970s ;)
Anywhere near?
ps: tedd, please cc me in to the final answer as I won't have time
to check the list for a while, and I'm quite interested in this one
- kudos to you if you managed to do it and get both parties happy
with the result though!
Best,
Nathan
Nathan et al:
I rechecked my notes and this case took place circa 1996-7. The case
was settled out of court.
The final agreement (partly negotiated by me) was $1.00 per line.
The programmer had generated around 25,000 lines of code and the new
client agreed that the programmer could keep $25,000 of the up-front
money. It seemed like a clean and "easy to understand" arrangement.
Since that time, I have often looked to my own code to see how that
figure holds up. In my most recent work, I was paid around $0.50 per
line of code.
Keep in mind that this is for finished and working code and *not* all
the code I wrote to investigate/test/solve the various problems. My
typical method of problem solving is to write small stand-alone
solutions and then move them to the larger project. It is the code in
the larger project that's considered in the cost determination.
So for me, about $0.50 per line of code seems to hold up for projects
that exceed 100 hours. For projects that are less, the cost per line
increases. For example, I had one project where I wrote three lines
of code and was paid $200. However, it took me several hours to
figure out what to do and where to put the line.
In any event, this is where one statement per line (including braces) pays off.
Cheers,
tedd
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