Junior Developers Should Give Code Review Too | Hacker News Reader

Junior Developers Should Give Code Review Too

scastiel.dev

4 pointsscastiel7 comments

Interesting article. To encourage and facilitate these code review conversations, I recommend utilizing a tool like Pullpo.io (https://pullpo.io/products/channels), It allows all members of the development team to have more enriching code reviews quickly on Slack, so junior developers are encouraged to contribute and grow.

As you said in the article, participating in code reviews is an opportunity for growth in countless ways. Junior developers should feel encouraged to partake and positively impact the team.

Dear junior developers, a rubber stamp code review is a waste of your time and mine, and since it counts as an approval in the build integration, it makes the code and product worse by taking the place of a real review.

Please instead flag things you don't understand and ask for an explanation. It's worth a senior developer's time to think about it, and either provide some useful training, or more often than they might be comfortable with, ask themselves some hard questions. Your fresh "junior" eyes are a feature as often as a bug, and see things that the seniors don't anymore.

I'd much rather have a junior give me a code review with, uh, less sophisticated criticisms, than one that assumes I know what I'm doing. It's at least a sign that they have paid attention.

Thank you, your point is the exact one I argue against in my post, which makes me happy I wrote it. No, junior developer reviews AND approvals are not a waste of time. If your code can’t be understood by a junior, it shouldn’t be considered as good enough to be merged.

I'm all in favor of junior developer reviews and approvals. I completely agree that if they can't understand the code, it's frequently a problem with the code. I'm against rubber stamps, where there's no evidence that they've engaged with it. Unfortunately that's the rule rather than the exception in my current environment. If e.g. a developer hasn't made a comment in dozens of reviews, and just returns an approval in a few minutes, junior or not it's a problem. My code isn't that good. Here, it's an epidemic among the juniors.

On this point I agree with you. And in my experience, it happens as often with seniors as with juniors. The famous “LGTM” on a 1000-line PR ;)

I'd love to know how to convince them to actually do reviews.

I guess one of the reasons they’re hard to convince is that they don’t understand why they should do it. Hopefully my post contains some tips to make them realize how it can help them and the team.

But ultimately, it can be a team rule to require every developer to spend some time on code review each day. I worked in some teams where you needed to review PRs to get review on your own. It worked pretty well :)

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