That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs. In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread.
Respectfully, in a high-trust environment, feedback should be delivered well before the PR stage. If you've let someone write a whole bunch of code without having a shared understanding of how the solution should work, you may have earlier process issues that PRs are papering over
With human reviewers, I find that by the time someone has churned out enough of a solution to post a PR, they are already quite invested in specifics of the solution, and it makes it emotionally costly (to both author and reviewer) when someone says "hey, I'm not a fan of this whole approach, lets start over and do it this other way"
The emotional toll there is real, but this is exactly the moment when you expose the knowledge of that external dependency to the unbiased party that is the reviewer.
I like combining approvals to satisfy the urge for completion and closure, with a request for fast-follow refactor to better match the newly discovered model of interaction. (The worst code review experience I have seen is when a reviewer accepts it as-is and does a fast follow refactor themselves, depriving the author of the opportunity to learn and remain an expert in that area)
If you have these parties review each other's code, I agree that rarely brings much value.
I think the best way to understand our experience with reviews is to stop and say: in a few sentences, what do you expect out of a quality code review? (sounds like nothing in your case, but I am curious)
From my perspective, there are three sorts of PRs:
- One is very close to the final form of a particular change, and any feedback you get at that late stage is indicative of holes in your process.
- Another is one where someone throws something up and says "hey, this is an experiment, can I get feedback on the approach". This is great, the parameters are clear, not much to say about these.
- The 3rd sort is someone making a trivial 5-line patch to a makefile/cargo.toml/github workflow/etc. These add basically no value to anyone.
Of those only the 2nd type really brings much value, and those are the ones that folks would keep posting even if you didn't require PRs (since they have an actual question, or a cool thing to show off).
I'll also note that this only really negatively impacts small remote teams, because on a sufficiently large, co-located team, you just ask your buddy one desk over to rubber stamp all the trivial commits...
Does everybody produce completely readable, tested code every time? Perhaps that's just "style" to you when it is "maintainability" to me?
Do your coworkers not reliably produce readable, tested code?
That's kind of the minimum bar for a software engineer in my book
Every question I get (when my code is reviewed) is a signal that code could be more self-explanatory, unless it is a complex algorithm itself, and that my — by now deep — exposure to the problem is keeping me misguided about what is and isn't "obvious" or "clear". A reviewer can take a step back and help ensure both them and I will be able to easily grasp the same code 3 or 24 months later.
Note that one of the best advice I got early in my career about doing a good code review is that you "just" need to ask good questions: the point is not for a reviewer to show how much smarter they are, but for both to develop a shared understanding and ensure code can be interpreted as quickly as possible.
For bigger changes, of course you need feedback on designs. But that could easily be in the form of draft PRs.
I definitely would push back on anything that required feedback before PRs. That's way too much process. Just going to slow you down for no benefit.