A long time ago, when I was a lowly programmer at a check-printing company, management required us to complete a weekly timesheet with one especially pointless question:
How many lines of code did you write this week?
Size matters sometimes. This was not one of those times. Any good programmer will tell you it is entirely possible to spend a productive day, or even a productive week, and finish with only a few lines of code.
More code is not more value
During peer review, I might submit 500 lines and receive 50 better ones in return. The shorter version could be clearer, faster, easier to maintain, and just as functional.
This did not mean the other programmer had done one-tenth the work. It usually meant that person was smarter than me.
One week, while feeling particularly smart myself, I simplified a complex contribution from one of the senior programmers by roughly 2,000 lines. He was not nearly as pleased about this as I was.
The most honest timesheet
I had removed about 2,000 lines and written roughly 380 elsewhere. So when the timesheet asked how many lines of code I had committed that week, I cheerfully wrote “−1,620.”
I turned it in and regretted the decision almost immediately. I spent the evening considering whether I could sneak back into the office and replace it before anybody noticed.
The next morning, I arrived sweating bullets and sat uncharacteristically quiet at my desk, waiting to be invited into a meeting where the phrase “career-limiting decision” would probably be used.
The meeting never happened
Management understood the point I had not known I was trying to make. That was the last week we had to report lines of code.
I also received a raise and a promotion. Nice.
True story.
The point, possibly
Activity is easy to count. Value is harder. More buttons do not make a better phone. More settings do not make a system more capable. More words do not make an explanation clearer.
Did the work make something meaningfully better?
Simple is usually the result of careful thinking.
Complexity should have to justify its existence.
That principle still shapes how we think at RocketVox. The goal is not to give customers more telecom to manage. The goal is to make business communication work with less effort.