How does this play with the Non disclosure agreements ?
ignore this comment. They have a background check and NDA process.
Code Review as a Service
151–160 of 238 posts
Re: Code Review as a Service
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't you say what you're thinking instead of disguising your opinions as questions?
Let me try: This looks way too cheap to be able to afford good enough reviewers to be worth using; if someone is good enough to be able to pick up a new codebase and usefully review changes that quickly, they'd get a better paying job.
If you read the rest of this thread you'll see numerous reviewers from the site giving their 2 cents. Much preferable to just making assumptions.
It's pretty clear that the people offering the service are doing it as a way of gaining extra income on the side rather than a main employment.
Re: Code Review as a Service
#153I lot of people are saying CR is a way to transfer knowledge within a team. I think they're missing the point. Sure, you can transfer knowledge within a PR but don't you think that's a bit late? By the time CR is requested, the code has been written, the architecture has been thought of and so much time has been wasted doing the "wrong" thing. It's a horrible way to learn/train.
Re: Code Review as a Service
#154I'm a reviewer on PullRequest, and thought I'd share some perspective. Happy to answer any questions in comments.
Background - I've built and led engineering teams at multiple fast-growing startups. In doing so I've seen the incredible value PR's can provide, but also the huge cost of them on small teams. I review on PullRequest part-time as I work full-time building a startup.
Many of the critics here are right. The PullRequest service won't catch every bug. As reviewers on this service, we lack context* to fully understand the impact of every code change.
However, this can be a blessing in disguise. As an outsider, I bring an entirely different set of context to the project. I can see errors or improvements that teams have become blind to, I don't have the pressure of shipping for X release, and I've often been not only where these teams are, but where these teams want to be in X months.
This is all done without using any man-hours on the client team - which is often a critically short resource.
Ultimately the proof is in the pudding, I raise comments on almost every single review I do, raising from best practice to architectural to security vulnerability, and the majority of the time teams take that feedback onboard.
Other QA:
Where are you located? I'm located in San Francisco.
Who approves PR's? I tend to consider my role to advise and sometimes mentor. I will give opinions, but it ultimately the client's job to approve/reject PR's.
My code is great, I don’t need this! Have you tried it? As an outsider, I catch peoples blind-spots. That said, PR is always looking for great reviewers to join the team!
* It's worth noting, that between seeing the code, optionally having access to the full code base, and asking questions of developers - I develop a decent mental model of most projects.
Re: Code Review as a Service
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me try: This looks way too cheap to be able to afford good enough reviewers to be worth using; if someone is good enough to be able to pick up a new codebase and usefully review changes that quickly, they'd get a better paying job.
If you read the rest of this thread you'll see numerous reviewers from the site giving their 2 cents. Much preferable to just making assumptions. It's pretty clear that the people offering the service are doing it as a way of gaining extra income on the side rather than a main employment.
He's got a point.
$50-3000 / week tells you nothing.
They should tell you the avg $ per hour.
Re: Code Review as a Service
#156I'm all for this if the person reviewing my code will know the context, history and all the details and conversations we had as a team. But in order for that to work, I'd probably be taking most of this reviewer's time. And obviously in order for them to get up to speed with our practices, conventions, architecture, code style and whatnot, they'd probably need to start by doing a whole lot of development on our proje…
Code should be written to be understood without that context. If comments and documentation aren’t enough context for the code to be understood, it probably isn’t written very well.
> it probably isn’t written very well.
If it's written "very well" then what's the point of a pull request code review? /headscratch
Re: Code Review as a Service
#157I'm all for this if the person reviewing my code will know the context, history and all the details and conversations we had as a team. But in order for that to work, I'd probably be taking most of this reviewer's time. And obviously in order for them to get up to speed with our practices, conventions, architecture, code style and whatnot, they'd probably need to start by doing a whole lot of development on our proje…
Having done more than a few PR reviews and code security reviews for their platform as an Android/Kotlin dev, I've found that the opposite problem is more common. A lot of organizations suffer from insular thinking and their own team often comments LGTM even if there's something glaring. Writing reviews as an outsider, there's something freeing about knowing that you can review honestly and professionally and not ove…
I think the point is internal and external code reviews are two different beasts - no harm in getting an external kicking to improve the coding practices. However, with nobody having skin in the game to get external code reviews into the codebase, they will largely be ignored as “nice but we have work to do”. How could a product like this (I think I’ve seen a few) solve that human nature problem?
Re: Code Review as a Service
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm one of those reviewers, and I agree with you about the talent. Not speaking about myself, but the people I've gotten to know and also the ones I have referred. Each PR gets two reviewers from pullrequest.com, and we get to see each others' comments. One will catch stuff the other misses, and we usually support each other. It's most fascinating when we disagree on something, which so far has always led to a high-q…
You do this on the side of your dayjob for extra income?
I have certainly done this. PullRequest bought the Moonlight developer gig platform. A lot of full-time developers from Moonlight also took on gigs from PullRequest as they've been using the platform to sell their service. I'd guess most reviewers have other jobs or contracts.
Re: Code Review as a Service
#159Can someone give a solid and succinct review of doing this as a side-job? What was 1) the hourly pay, 2) language(s) you reviewed, and 3) how was the work?
Re: Code Review as a Service
#160Gosh, building any tools that target developers as customers is a gargantuan task. Kudos to you for attempting something new here and giving it a whirl. We developers are some of the harshest critics around, no matter how legit or unfounded our criticism may be. Keep it up!