Hacker News Reader

I have never (in my 30+ years career) worked for a company that required formal code reviews. And yet have managed to deliver a ton of commercially successful software. I am pretty sure that adding a review step would have slowed me down tremendously. Without adding any commercial value.

However I can imagine that code reviews would work well for inexperienced developers being reviewed by more experienced developers?

View on HN

At least in the US, code reviews are essentially mandated by legal compliance in publicly-traded companies. The law (SOX) says something like "no one person can destroy the company by making an engineering change", so viola, code review was invented. Private companies can probably get away with not doing code reviews, but often private companies want to pass security reviews like SOC 2.

> I am pretty sure that adding a review step would have slowed me down tremendously

This is very true. Everyone should work on a personal side-project at some point and realize just how much code review slows things down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com