Code review can be better • Hacker News Board

Re: Code review can be better

#251

Post by deterministic » Tue, Aug 26, 2025, 4:10 AM UTC

I have never (in my 30+ years career) worked for a company that required formal code reviews. And yet have managed to deliver a ton of commercially successful software. I am pretty sure that adding a review step would have slowed me down tremendously. Without adding any commercial value.

However I can imagine that code reviews would work well for inexperienced developers being reviewed by more experienced developers?

Re: Code review can be better

#252

Post by l2dy » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:00 AM UTC

kungfufrog wrote: post #154

Anyone know what editor the author is using in the first screenshot showing two panels side by side?

Probably VS Code with https://github.com/kahole/edamagit

Re: Code review can be better

#253

Post by phendrenad2 » Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

deterministic wrote: post #251

I have never (in my 30+ years career) worked for a company that required formal code reviews. And yet have managed to deliver a ton of commercially successful software. I am pretty sure that adding a review step would have slowed me down tremendously. Without adding any commercial value. However I can imagine that code reviews would work well for inexperienced developers being reviewed by more experienced developers?

At least in the US, code reviews are essentially mandated by legal compliance in publicly-traded companies. The law (SOX) says something like "no one person can destroy the company by making an engineering change", so viola, code review was invented. Private companies can probably get away with not doing code reviews, but often private companies want to pass security reviews like SOC 2.

> I am pretty sure that adding a review step would have slowed me down tremendously

This is very true. Everyone should work on a personal side-project at some point and realize just how much code review slows things down.