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Comment by whydoyoucare | Hacker News Reader

"Technical facts and data overrule opinions and personal preferences." So true, so true!

Now if teams pay careful attention to this statement, the Code Review Guidelines can be shortened by an order of a magnitude! ;-)

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Code Review Guidelines are an amalgamation of said technical facts and data, data gained through experience of the company's entire lifespan, but also mixed in with a ton of personal preferences along the way. The trick is separating the two ;)

As a general rule, absolutely! Unfortunately, if applied too strictly though, it can be weaponized or stifling in ways you may not anticipate (which tends to be true of almost any rule used too universally).

For example: I’ve seen cases where there’s disagreement as to which of two technical paths to pursue, where one side (not liking the way consensus is currently leaning) demands a data driven proof that one of the choices is best. Ordinarily this would be fine, but in this case, it would take no less work/time to gather said data than to entirely implement both solutions and directly compare them.

> in this case, it would take no less work/time to gather said data than to entirely implement both solutions and directly compare them.

So why not do this?

In this case either of the solutions would satisfactorily solve the problem, so implementing both would be redundant and wasteful. The problem appears in this case when there’s disagreement on which of the two satisfactory solution paths should be taken. Implementation work cannot proceed until it’s decided which solution path is to be taken (even though they both work), but there’s no way to prove which is best aside from general intuition arguments, or actually implementing both (which as mentioned, would be a waste of resources for no benefit).

Isn’t that simply a sign of deeper problems in the organisation?

Yes most likely; that’s my point. It can become a serious organizational problem when useful codified heuristics like this are able to be abused in this way (by treating them as immutable rules, or used as a weapon to win arguments).

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