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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

Code reviews/design critiques are extremely valuable even if you only have two developers, and they're both great at their jobs. It's not about not trusting the other members of your team, it's about learning from each others' experiences and creating a better product together.

But I agree that the level of ceremony surrounding the process will vary a lot based on the size of your organization.

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I agree that review/critique is just as important, even if you have only a few people. Even with a small group though, roles for participants can help keep conversations on track and civil and ensure everyone can participate.

Establishing roles for bad-actor participants is not how you keep conversations on track and keep them civil, it's how you get passive aggression.

A lot of corporate policies are about limiting damage by bad actors.

I know. My point is that large corporations have little in common with startups. A startup should not already be so ossified that it's possible for bad actors to get in and stay in.

In other words, if you get to the point that you need to wage legalese wars with corporate policy documents, you're probably not a startup anymore. We really need to stop treating big, 5+ year old companies like Twitter as "startups".

Roles can help to keep conversations civil when the participants are benign as well as malign by removing communication friction. For malign actors they make it easier to pick out specific behaviours to review in one on ones and - if they persist - dismiss them for.

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