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I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

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Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#101

Post by deogeo »

Fellshard wrote: post #26
iheartpotatoes wrote: post #8

This is incredibly honest. Maybe it's just me, but it 100% resonates with me. I find myself doing the exact same thing: as soon as I feel myself mounting up on my high-horse I have to talk myself down from being an asshat. I've gotten better at it because I'm now responsible for people's careers, and my pettiness is no reason to make someone's life suck because they are still learning -OR- because they think differen…

I don't think diversity of skin color and gender will solve this problem in its entirety too. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be this kind of self-centered egotist. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be excellent developers who are focused outwards, on developing their teammates and building things well. Diversity is part of the picture, yes, but it's no instant win,…

> People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be this kind of self-centered egotist

He didn't imply that women and non-whites can't be self-centered egotists, only that they're less so than white men. Despite the author of the article being Russian, a very different culture than the US.

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#102

Post by 0815test »

pault wrote: post #93
iheartpotatoes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you feel the need to state the obvious? This is the kind of toxic nonsense that comes up every time someone mentions diversity. Its the status-quo "notallmen" argument again and again and again. Please, assume just for a minute that we aren't all idiots. Of -course- everyone has the capacity to be an idiot, but your unnecessary and highly defensive response is very telling.

Where did you get that the GP was highly defensive? I didn't read that at all. TBH I also thought it was strange that the proposed solution to certain toxic personalities was to hire different genders and races, which seems like a non sequitur to me.

Personality does correlate with gender, albeit very weakly. And differences in 'race' correlate with different social/cultural contexts to an extent that might have some effect as well - indeed, 'race' is itself a social construct that largely reflects differences in culture.

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#103

Post by dsabanin »

zerogvt wrote: post #55

What an alpha-male antagonistic dog-eat-dog bloody hell is this! Jesus, if that is the current or future the norm in this profession I'd better jump off to a career (any career) that involves as little relation to computers as possible. Kudos for saying it aloud though. Honesty is gold (at least in my books).

I believe it's the past. Professional IT culture in Russia is in many ways retrograde compared to Western countries, especially the part that concerns mentorship, education and professional ethics. It's changing, but slowly.

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#104

Post by threatofrain »

iheartpotatoes wrote: post #72
Fellshard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think diversity of skin color and gender will solve this problem in its entirety too. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be this kind of self-centered egotist. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be excellent developers who are focused outwards, on developing their teammates and building things well. Diversity is part of the picture, yes, but it's no instant win,…

Why did you feel the need to state the obvious? This is the kind of toxic nonsense that comes up every time someone mentions diversity. Its the status-quo "notallmen" argument again and again and again. Please, assume just for a minute that we aren't all idiots. Of -course- everyone has the capacity to be an idiot, but your unnecessary and highly defensive response is very telling.

The interesting part of this pushback isn't that there's between-individual variability with different populations, but that "white guy with stickers on his laptop", and the realm of predictive strategies that implies, is a very poor indicator of intellectual broadness or diversity.

But do you really care, seeing as to how you've already furthered a theory of someone else being either emotionally hostile or defensive?

And do you really not see the obviousness of how a certain situation plays out, of someone using white guy with stickers on laptop as a symbol for toxicity? Or do you see the obviousness, and that's why you're playing the situation out this way?

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#105

Post by PenguinCoder »

newnewpdro wrote: post #90
lainga wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh lord, the stickers. I felt an interview with a local startup turn south when I pulled my Thinkpad out and was asked "where are the stickers?".

You do want to express yourself, don't you? (Sarcasm, Office Space reference, I'm with you on the stickers.)

Agreed. I'd much rather not advertise for anyone/company, and especially not throwing sticky residue all over my expensive laptop.

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#106

Post by remote_phone »

kristiandupont wrote: post #86
remote_phone wrote: post #73

I am an notoriously tough code reviewer. Not because I’m mean, but I’m thorough and consistent. I’m never passive aggressive and simply factual. But newer team members can find dozens of comments until they understand what my expectations are. I can generally differentiate between personal opinion and bad form. I rarely comment on things like variable names, or function names unless they are really confusing or misle…

I can recognize some of the traits from the article in myself and I can guarantee you that I (and, I suspect OP as well) would be quick to claim that my comments are "merely factual" and that I am great at differentiating personal opinion from bad form as well. I don't know you, so you might be 100% right but if the article makes you feel slightly defensive, perhaps it's a good reason to do some introspection.

I don’t feel defensive at all, I think OP is probably a terrible code reviewer and makes me feel better about how I code review.

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#108

Post by MaulingMonkey »

sauceop wrote: post #65
MaulingMonkey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes fall into a similar trap. Usually on the larger changelists where I was struggling to keep the focus necessary to find the serious bugs, but not being comfortable only looking at half the files in the code review - feeling like I'd not be doing my part of the job I didn't at least look at them. I have to remind myself that there's a limit to how useful nitpicking can be, and that it can become counterprod…

I don't have your context, but if the changelist author is writing multithreaded code where there's no way that a reader can convince themselves of the correctness, then my heuristic is that the burden is on the author to improve the code to be easier to reason about and add enough tests to exercise all of the interesting code paths. There are always techniques to simplify code or make it easier to grasp.

I have similar heuristics. I'm drawn to Rust because I really like the idea of having to prove it's at least data race free to the compiler (not that this will solve the problem of deadlocks.) In most situations I'd push back on code that got half as tricky with it's multithreading.

Simplifying is easy. Early versions of this code, years ago, were simple. They weren't even multithreaded! Just a simple implementation to unblock other devs.

But now it's a highly used bottleneck that must be high throughput, low latency, support asynchronous cancellation of requests, interacts with the main thread for third party APIs that aren't thread safe (such as d3d9), interacts with the main thread for our own APIs which aren't thread safe by design (our debug replay system replays the events of the main thread), but must avoid synchronizing with the main thread for performance elsewhere...

Simplifying this without performance or feature regressions is significantly more difficult. Possible, but difficult. And benefits from slow, testable, incremental changes. But that means reviewing incremental diffs on the large and complicated existing system in the interim. At least it has some of our best test coverage, including lots of tests to help try and tease out threading bugs. They don't always succeed at that, but they do help.

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#109

Post by bjourne »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #96

Somewhat related, can anyone recommend a place to get code reviews. I work for myself, and I haven't had many opportunities for code review in my career. I'm willing to pay market rate for a senior engineer's time. I personally need feedback for C, Swift, Python, and Javascript.

Sadly, developers do it for free. https://codereview.stackexchange.com/ Pay with market rate upvotes. :)

Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

#110

Post by freewilly1040 »

finnthehuman wrote: post #28

This guy ties his ego to his code, and assumes everyone does the same. The proposed solution is to not devalue the person by devaluing the code. This seems exactly backwards to me. Disconnecting ego from the work was the first big lesson I had when I started working in software. I hear parallel ideas from friends across industries, in fact an electrical contractor explained to me how he expects it of his apprentices…

It's a theme I hear a lot when I see interviews of powerful business people - you don't do anyone a favor by pretending something that is bad is good.

Agreed that the OP took the wrong lesson - the fix is not to lower standards, the fix is to learn to deliver honest and complete feedback with empathy.

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