This CNN story exposes its fatal flaw in the second paragraph … you can’t measure programmer productivity by the number of lines of code that the programmer writes. This article talks about the fact that American programmers are much less productive than their overseas because they only produce about 7,700 lines of code a year compared to the overseas average of 16,700. I don’t know enough about programmers as in general to say whether Americans are more or less productive than non-Americans, but I do know that the study measures the productivity using a ridiculous yard stick. My guess is that Americans are less productive because they have to go to too many meetings.