Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

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> In an environment that places stress on those who underperform, anything that calls attention to performance problems will be hated. Anyone that points out those problems will be disliked. Even the best people will fall to this stress.

Seems to me that this might be the problem rather than the code review itself!

> We could decide together if it was worth the effort to make those changes. Async communications like PRs and emails simply aren't fit for that kind of discussion.

Indeed. I've definitely found myself falling into a pattern of failing the review for serious issues with comments on the PR, but just approving the review and slacking the comments for small issues.

This is probably my biggest beef with the "culture" of software development nowadays.

Back in my day (hold on while I go grab my cane...) software developers would just flap their lips and sound would come out at each other.

Nowadays there seems to be this underlying assumption that actually talking to each other is a waste of time, that it should all be documented with no curation, and should always be in PR's, et al.

I'm all for documenting decisions, but I feel like it's not too much effort to swing by someone's office and have a discussion with them. At that point, maybe you don't even need to document if the updates are small issues. Is it really so all-encompassingly important?

But maybe I'm just old. Most of the time I'd rather talk to a human when I call into tech support too (unless it's something obviously automated like making a payment).

> I feel like it's not too much effort to swing by someone's office and have a discussion with them

Well there is a modern trend that's supposed to help with this too: open plan offices. No need to swing by their office, they're already right there (this has indeed been my working environment for most of my career).

It's all a bit different at the moment of course, but my team regularly video calls each other to discuss things that would take too long over text.

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