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Comment by unbalancedevh | Hacker News Reader

> requiring my team to review their own PRs before they expect a senior developer to review them

I'm having a hard time imagining the alternative. Do junior developers not take any pride in their work? I want to be sure my code works before I submit it for review. It's embarrassing to me if it fails basic requirements. And as a reviewer, what I want to see more than anything is how the developer assessed that their code works. I don't want to dig into the code unless I need to -- show me the validation and results, and convince me why I should approve it.

I've seen plenty of examples of developers who don't know how to effectively validate their work, or document the validation. But that's different than no validation effort at all.

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> Do junior developers not take any pride in their work?

Yes. I have lost count of the number of PRs that have come to me where the developer added random blank lines and deleted others from code that was not even in the file they were supposed to be working in.

I'm with you -- I review my own PRs just to make sure I didn't inadvertently include something that would make me look sloppy. I smoke test it, I write comments explaining the rationale, etc. But one of my core personality traits (mostly causing me pain, but useful in this instance) is how much I loathe being wrong, especially for silly reasons. Some people are very comfortable with just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it'll stick.

> added random blank lines and deleted others from code that was not even in the file they were supposed to be working in.

Maybe some kind of auto-formatter?

That is my charitable interpretation, but it's always one or two changes across a module that has hundreds, maybe thousands of lines of code. I'd expect an auto-formatter to be more obvious.

In any case, just looking over your own PR briefly before submitting it catches these quickly. The lack of attention to detail is the part I find more frustrating than the actual unnecessary format changes.

Why would you are about blank lines? Sounds like aborted attempts at a change to me. Then realizing you don’t need them. Seeing them in your PR, and figuring they don’t actually do anything to me.

More likely artifact of debug prints being removed.

> Yes. I have lost count of the number of PRs that have come to me where the developer added random blank lines and deleted others from code that was not even in the file they were supposed to be working in.

That’s not a great example of lack of care, of you use code formatters then this can happen very easily and be overlooked in a big change. It’s also really low stakes, I’m frankly concerned that you care so much about this that you’d label a dev careless over it. I’d label someone careless who didn’t test every branch of their code and left a nil pointer error or something, but missing formatter changes seems like a very human mistake for someone who was still careful about the actual code they wrote.

I think the point is that a necessary part of being careful is reviewing the diff yourself end-to-end right before sending it out for review. That catches mistakes like these.

i myself have been guilty of creating a pr and immediately pushing a commit to clean that stuff up

Many are just doing SWE for the money.

Their goal is to pass the hot potato to someone else, so they can say in the standup "oh I'm waiting on review" making it not their problem.

> I want to be sure my code works before I submit it for review.

No kidding. I mean, "it works" is table stakes, to the point I can't even imagine going to review without having tested things locally at least to be confident in my changes. The self-review for me is to force me to digest my whole patch and make sure I haven't left a bunch of TODO comments or sloppy POC code in the branch. I'd be embarrassed to get caught leaving commented code in my branch - I'd be mortified if somehow I submitted a PR that just straight up didn't work.

It’s cultural. It always seemed natural to me, until I joined a team that treated review as some compliance checkbox that had nothing to do with the real work.

Things like real review as an important part of the work requires a culture that values it.

Oh junior devs submit PRs that don't fully work all the time.

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