Push and Pull
kellanem.com
kellanem.com
The problem with this is nobody is performance managed on PR reviews. Features are often what get put on performance reviews, so it becomes beneficial to the PR author to go work on another feature than review someone else’s PR. Reviewing a PR for a feature doesn’t get your name attached to it. More often than not, your review is considered a formality imposed by upper management and impediment to the feature in the eyes of line managers. Those headwinds turn PRs into a classic Volunteer’s Dilemma [0].
PRs have dwell times of weeks. It’s all broken, but somehow we are all convinced that this is better than a formalised change review process.
Never mind the inability to plan work, or having to have yet another discussion with some corporate random that happens to be reviewing your PR and has a thousand questions as to why this particular functionality needs to be implemented, and why weren’t they consulted - dude, here is all the process documentation, go complain at management, not me.
But in the meantime, management wants to know why x was not delivered on time.
As soon as we get above two or three tightly knit people internal communication starts to become the bottleneck. It's inherently serialized. It's the human equivalent of Amdahl's law.
Never has it been more clear than when remote work took over in organization that are not built on it from the start. While we all feel more productive without office chit chat it all has to be compensated somehow if we're going to be aligned with common goals.
Perhaps we need to dedicate 25% work time to PR's. It's just half of what pair programming is and plenty of people are productive doing that.
It's a pretty established practice within the Goog eng teams I've interacted with. Consistently and noticeably failing to meet the 1 day response would be minor grounds for perf mgmt, I reckon. Never would happen for just that problem by itself, but would be mentioned alongside other problems perhaps. Just providing an anecdotal counterpoint...
Now you can’t do a new thing you have to take the PR!
But these seem as two sides of the same coin, not as orthogonal concepts.
Push is a about something general and in the future. “Every week, put in a status update.” and “As PRs come in, review them as soon as you can.”
Pull is concrete and about something in the past. “I saw in your status update yesterday you’re blocked by the auth bug.” and “Let’s start the meeting by checking our PR queue.”
Phrasing it like that, it makes it obvious why pull is underserved. People in general, especially software engineers, love talking about the general future. In almost any software process, there’s a huge advantage in giving more attention to the concrete past then it gets right now.
The team that I’m on starts every weekly team meeting on Friday morning with “positive shoutouts”, where we just say good things other people did that week. Concrete, past, positive. Great way to start a meeting. (It is also a “low politics” team, so I have yet to see much gamesmanship.)