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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Really man. I have almost two decades developing software and yet, I feel a lot more comfortable having all my code reviewed. If anything I get annoyed by junior developers in my team when they just rub-stamp my PRs because supposedly I am this super senior guy that can't err. Code Reviews are supposed to give you peace of mind, not being a hassle.

During all this time, I've seen plenty of "small changes" having completely unexpected consequences, and sometimes all it would take to avoid would someone else seeing it from another perspective.

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At 30 years of coding professionally in great engineering-focused organizations, and that on top of nearly a lifetime of having coded for myself, I’ve concluded code reviews barely work.

I agree with everything you say here, but honestly it’s quite ineffective. I wish we had found something better than unit tests (often misleading and fragile) and the ability of a qualified reviewer to maintain attention and context that a real review entails.

IMO catching bugs is a nice side-effect of code reviews.

The primary value I've seen across teams has been more on having shared team context across a codebase, if something goes bump in the night you've got a sense on how that part of the codebase works. It's also a great opportunity for other engineers to ask "why" and explain parts that aren't obvious or other context that's relevant. We'll find the occasional architectural mismatch(although we like to catch those much earlier in the design process) and certainly prevented bugs from shipping but if that's the primary focus I think a team is missing a lot of the value from regular code reviews.

Yes, I don’t disagree, I just think in practice they do the job very poorly. I’ve tried many things over the years trying to make this work but honestly have found nothing that works at the high end.

At the low end of engineering, yeah, code reviews matter a ton and do catch bugs even if they’re basically just peephole inspections.

Not a man.

I’m not convinced bad code would get merged more often if we didn’t require approvals. I am convinced we’d deliver code faster though, and that’s what I’m trying to optimize for. Your company and engineering problems are not the same as mine.

Optimizing for delivering faster is usually the wrong thing to optimize for. Usually the issue is making sure the right things are delivered.

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