I found two online sources saying that the average is 10-12 lines of code per programmer per day. So, call it 20 lines of code per day. That’s 250,000 days. Now divide that by the number of programmers. Except coordinating that many programmers is a huge headache. Then, you have to test the code. Then there will still be bugs. Plus, you have to get the politics out of it and just present the prices without trying to sugar coat them.
My recollection is that for military contracts we bid 10 lines per day per programmer.
9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month... :)
“Lines of code” is an absolutely outdated metric. In the dot-net world, particularly in C#, I can write a single delegate wrapper that contains an Lambda expression that is so powerful it can iterate and manipulate a vast collection of objects. This one line of code might take a day to create and test.