In the job I just left, we were asked to define metrics upon which we'd be evaluated at our yearly reviews, and in my last two years there I chose, for one of the metrics, Lines of Code Deleted [without negative business impact, e.g. breaking features that customers relied on]. This was in an organization with crippling technical debt.
As far as I know I was the only one in the org to do this, and, while I thought initially that it was a slightly outrageous metric, I now believe that if every engineer had taken it upon her/himself to do the same, starting just a few years ago, we'd have wound up in a significantly better place business-wise today.
A corollary to this approach is that Choice of Language Matters; all other things being equal, you should use tools and languages that give you the same functionality with less code.
As far as I know I was the only one in the org to do this, and, while I thought initially that it was a slightly outrageous metric, I now believe that if every engineer had taken it upon her/himself to do the same, starting just a few years ago, we'd have wound up in a significantly better place business-wise today.
A corollary to this approach is that Choice of Language Matters; all other things being equal, you should use tools and languages that give you the same functionality with less code.