I seem to be one of the minority of people for whome this post has resonated well.
In my experience, code reviews are awful in the same way that micromanagement is awful. It's based on a lack of trust, first and foremost. It's also insulting. What's more insulting is being forced to deal with unreasonable review comments.
More than once, I had the experience of spending several days working on a feature, only to be blocked by some unreasonable "team member" who has weird fetishes about spacing and variable names and such fluff. It's really frustrating and insulting.
What's more, it doesn't really contribute anything to actual code or product quality.
The overwhelming sentiment I see on comments supporting the mandating of code reviews on every single commit seems to be based on the idea that everyone is a junior who makes obvious mistakes that are easy to catch by just having someone else take a look at the code.
I suppose this should not be very surprising.
I've noticed in the last few years more and more companies prefer to hire beginners (since they are cheap), and there's a huge wave of people who are learning programming to improve their careers and their lives -- which is a good thing for these people -- but it means a lot of teams are full of newbies.
So it makes sense in this context to install a lot of "guard rails".
What I don't understand is why everyone thinks mandating code reviews is a good idea in the general case.
In my experience, code reviews are awful in the same way that micromanagement is awful. It's based on a lack of trust, first and foremost. It's also insulting. What's more insulting is being forced to deal with unreasonable review comments.
More than once, I had the experience of spending several days working on a feature, only to be blocked by some unreasonable "team member" who has weird fetishes about spacing and variable names and such fluff. It's really frustrating and insulting.
What's more, it doesn't really contribute anything to actual code or product quality.
The overwhelming sentiment I see on comments supporting the mandating of code reviews on every single commit seems to be based on the idea that everyone is a junior who makes obvious mistakes that are easy to catch by just having someone else take a look at the code.
I suppose this should not be very surprising.
I've noticed in the last few years more and more companies prefer to hire beginners (since they are cheap), and there's a huge wave of people who are learning programming to improve their careers and their lives -- which is a good thing for these people -- but it means a lot of teams are full of newbies.
So it makes sense in this context to install a lot of "guard rails".
What I don't understand is why everyone thinks mandating code reviews is a good idea in the general case.