Re: tedd's Friday Post ($ per line)

Nathan Rixham wrote:

tedd wrote:

Now, back to the question at hand -- what price would you sell a line of your code for?

Just realised I responded to the wrong question - the answer was how I'd approach the original question "What do you think he was paid?" For myself, I wouldn't place a price on a single line of code, you can have one for free :) if you want me to do 25,000 lines of code then it'll be circa £1 GBP per line, seeing as you aren't considering any of the other factors. Unless it's open source as I cc-zero all my open source / community stuff.

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