Code review is overrated. Over my career I've built 8/9 figure revenue platforms without code review or serious test setups.
A lot of this cruft is unnecessary when compared to good domain knowledge and solid coding focus.
A lot of this cruft is unnecessary when compared to good domain knowledge and solid coding focus.
This does not diminish code reviews. Would you be a better engineer today if you had regularly participated in code reviews? Would your coworkers?
1. Reviewers are often poorly trained to provide good design reviews and default to nit-picky stuff a code linter should pickup. Human linting is just a poor use of time and money.
2. Nobody seems to ever have time for them to deep dive into the code.
3. Few engineers seem to ever actually want to do them.
4. Reviews can become hostile.
Code reviews are probably really important in some fields, for example, medical equipment, aviation, etc, but for the vast number of projects where we're shoveling A bits to B bucket or transforming C bits into D bits it's overkill and companies would be better off investing the massive amount of wasted time in better CI/CD infrastructure.
Maybe, but probably not. It's not like I never see someone's code, it's right there when I'm working in the same code base and I can go through commits to see the high-level changes.
There are lots of ways to become a better engineer and code reviews are pretty far down on the list in my view. They usually just turn into tedious ordeals that burn up actual productive time.
1. Make sure you don't do something dumb + mentor/educate to better standards.
2. Share the knowledge of how a codebase works so that someone else will know how to fix something at 3am when you can't be reached.
For example, a way to for reviewers to just mark a review as 'acknowledged' and submit a list of potential concerns (which may freely be ignored by the author). This makes them much more low friction as the reviewer is scanning the code to understand the purpose of it and help think of potential pitfalls at a high-level, rather than nit-picking apart little details.
I've mentioned it in previous threads, but we try to prevent hostile reviews by separating the code from the coder. Comments should not reference the author, only the code.
The counterpoint is that this good domain knowledge is bettered by considering other's changes.
Scientific research suggests otherwise though.