Hacker News Reader

Comment by cat_plus_plus | Hacker News Reader

The primary purpose of code review is to maintain existing hierarchy by preventing junior SWEs from getting promoted by committing code that is smarter than what the senior architect can understand.

View on HN

If the code is so smart that it's not easily understandable, it's not easily fixable. My transition from junior to senior was accompanied by the realization that simpler is nearly always better.

Write me simple AI inference code that has high performance in big batches.

I don't know enough to speak about that particular domain, but if the junior is writing something the senior can't understand, that's always going to be a problem. That code becomes the team's responsibility, and that code needs to be able to be maintained by the entire team, not only by the junior with something to prove.

Who is getting called at 2 AM when something breaks? Not the junior.

Hehe you think L9s do oncall? Senior not understanding is a problem all right. It's not necessarily junior's problem.

I feel like you keep missing the point and are more interested in gotcha's.

Does tinygrad not count for some reason?

No senior architect around here is capable of understanding tinygrad

Good programmers write code that’s so simple and obvious it looks like anyone could have written it.

Bad programmers make the simplest things really complicated.

Great programmers write code that makes you wonder why everyone doesn't do it like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com