Exactly. I once worked on a large project where the primary contractor was Accenture. They threw a party when we hit a million lines of C++. I sat in the back at a table with the other folks who knew enough to realize it should have been a wake.

It’s just the easiest metric to measure progress. Measuring real progress in terms of meeting user needs with high quality is a lot harder.

Oh yeah. At a previous job there was a guy who'd deleted more code than he'd written which I always found a little amusing.

Being in a similar position to him now though... if it can be deleted it gets deleted.