Usually my strategy, but it breaks down if you have someone who is bad enough at merge conflict resolution. We had one guy Steve who was upset that he was not as in charge as he wants to be, but he was doing a few things that break my trust so we are keeping him on a shorter leash than he likes. His code and ideas are okay but not great. He’s picking on this guy Mark, who sat next to me, to make himself look more valuable. Mark was not the brightest senior dev I ever worked with but he had his uses, and I hate bullies. Last but not least he was that he was terrible at merges and his solution to this problem was to delay as long as possible. We are a full CI environment and he’s making work for others by doing this. Namely me. None of these are conducive to me giving out a lot of responsibility, so he has some but not what he was after.
One day he’s blaming Mark for a regression in the code. Being pretty loud about it in fact. When I look at the bug, it sure looks like the sort of mistake Mark would make, and the annotation says Mark. Only the thing is that I’m the one who reviewed this code and I know Mark so I was looking for exactly this sort of bug and was pleasantly surprised to find that he was learning and had dodged that pitfall. So I go excavating the history and sure enough, that bug wasn’t in the code I reviewed. It was in Steve’s merge resolution. Fuckin’ Steves, man. And the fact that git lets you do things like that is not a great feature either.