What's nuts is how many intelligent people— people who would say "of course 'LOC written' is a terrible measure of developer productivity, of course only a dysfunctional company run by morons would do that"— have immediately bought into this. Amazon has token use mandates, I've heard Google has token use "leaderboards", friends at startups say they all get graded on tokens used. It's like watching your sensible, levelheaded friend go completely off the rails; collective madness.
It's a test of practical intelligence.
> collective madness
mass hysteria perhaps?
There used to be a time where people used to die from dancing too much (from my understanding in which hey I can be wrong, I usually am): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
I think that although we wish to consider ourselves as smart and really intelligent but we run on biological machines and clocks which evolutionary have not much of a difference since 1518 or even the times when we used to hunt and forage for that matter.
Some people respond to incentives. The rest of us are just trying to do our jobs and will probably be fired and then later consumed by the basilisk. We are living in an age of extremophiles.