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

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141–150 of 199 posts

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

#141
post #2

Congrats to the author for realizing that confidence doesn't equate skill. This isn't being a pink unicorn, it's simply humility. The real danger of confusing the two is that real skill dulls if you let overconfidence take over, since the very thought of being "better than others" prevents you from accepting that maybe there are things that you don't know or haven't considered. For example, is "destroying" a coworker…

Humility goes a long way in life. Anecdotally, it's definitely something a lot of software developers and systems engineers should learn how to practice.

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

#142
post #47

90% of a code review is not about finding THE BUG in the PR but asking questions and making the author find his own bugs or learning something from him. If you are performing a code review hunting for bugs you already lost your humility and think you are better then the PR author.

Have you ever written some text, and re-read it, and it sounded just right, and had someone else read it, and they said "what does this mean"? Sometimes the words you write are sufficient to trigger in your own head the thoughts you've already had, but not enough to make someone else think those same thoughts. Code can be like that, too. You write code, and it's enough to convince you that it does what you think it d…

I'm not saying that you will never find bugs in someone PRs I'm just saying it shouldn't be your first intention, your first intention should be to understand it and be convinced by it. Finding bugs will be a side effect of that. If you reading the code to execute it in your head and find all the weird combination that could trigger a core dump, you should probably check if the author wrote tests for those use cases instead and comment about missing tests. Genuine interest in others work can go a long way compared to imagining how would you solve it like the article author said.

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

#143
A team I was on years back had developers like this. My role there was as an infra dev where the main project was to install security daemons on a bunch of hosts. The devs who worked on the project for two years basically made an unusable piece of junk, with infrastructure written in four different languages. In my role I was expected to use what they built, but it never worked, though the opinionated devs didn't believe in storing logs, calling it an "ephemeral" system and we could never know why the damn thing didn't work. So we had to ssh into hosts and install the daemons by hand.

At one point we had a major issue with a client, because our daemons weren't installed on their hosts right before a major event of theirs, and none of the tooling could install on this clients' hosts. So I threw something together over an afternoon that could do it all by frankensteining the other devs' code. It was run-once code to fix the emergency. Lots of selenium garbage.

Since it was one-off, hacky code, I didn't feel it was necessary to put it into git, so I didn't.. until others complained to management and forced me to. From there, I had about four devs dog pile my code, commenting on everything wrong with it - maybe 20-30 comments. I explained that it was one-off code meant to solve a specific problem and of course it was going to be messy, but I got responses like "if your code was made public, you'd want your code to be clean so you can be proud of it!". It was infuriating, considering their system worked maybe 5% of the time.

I'd like to say it was in good-faith, but I really doubt it. At one point while I was there, one of the devs rejected a PR because I had bash in an Ansible role, saying "you don't know if the remote host will have bash installed."

That whole ordeal was enough to leave the company.

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

#144
Is ths really the norm though? If this really happened to you, by all mean voice your story, but it's not fair to make up story just to get a point across, as they could unrealistically pain the software developer community a bunch of a-holes. In reality, most people I worked with are sympathetic as code review is one of the first skills we learn working professionally.

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

#145
post #83
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> excessive amount of criticism on working code Because it creates technical debt, that's why people get frustrated with shit code. They just aren't properly equipped how to convey/teach/train/fix it without coming across like an asshole.

> Because it creates technical debt Does it ? Sometimes, the code reviewer has taken less time to analyze the problem and has not seen all problems a simpler solutions would bring.

This is why it's better to phrase the review points as questions, e.g.: "Why is this done in this way, ? Wouldn't x be more efficient ?"

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

#146
post #84

> If a guy brings me his code, and it has mistakes, it brings insane pleasure from how smart I feel [...] And if you tell me that you haven’t had this feeling ever, then you’re lying. Tell me about higher goals, training rookies and all that — I know you’re simply too full of themselves. And if you try to tell me that you learned to defeat that feeling (however it manifests in you), then I must be a pink unicorn. I r…

I have worked with people like the author. They suck. They destroy entire teams and often times the feedback is 99% pedantic personal preferences because why would they do something useful like setup the linter and propose the silly things they always nit pick. These people don’t last long and I have gotten pretty good at screening out this personality in interviews after having it cause huge issues at two different…

"These people don’t last long and I have gotten pretty good at screening out this personality in interviews after having it cause huge issues at two different places I worked."

Well, now everyone is curious for more details on this. Do share :)

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

#147
post #87

This except there is no right way and there are 'n' equally good ways of solving any real world problem. It's only worth pointing out flaws if something is genuinely bad and I mean bad. Otherwise you are using a gut opinion to trash someone else's emotional health. Yay! you found an edge case that breaks a piece of code that will never get hit while the other million and 1 edge cases that haven't been found are still…

> there are 'n' equally good ways of solving any real world problem. This is objectively, mathematically, incorrect. There are optimal solutions, and for some/many problems, there is one optimal solution.

well done for illustrating my point

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

#148
post #78

I speak Russian and used to read habr.com a lot, which is a Russian-speaking platform where the community members can post on topics related to software engineering, computers, and tech in general. (As you can notice, habr.com have also been trying to gain an English-speaking readers for some time now.) So I read or saw multiple articles in Russian from this specific author. Actually, the one linked in this post is a…

I was under the impression that the author was going for an Underground Man vibe.

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

#149

There's something to be said for "Marine Drill Instructor" responses. When the DI is screaming profanities at recruits, [s]he is preemptively saving their lives. The manner in which it is done, is actually a component of the training. A significant part of military training, is to deprecate the individual, in favor of the team. The DI is not an individual. They are the sharp end of the elite organization that the rec…

[deleted]

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

#150
post #97
post #78

I speak Russian and used to read habr.com a lot, which is a Russian-speaking platform where the community members can post on topics related to software engineering, computers, and tech in general. (As you can notice, habr.com have also been trying to gain an English-speaking readers for some time now.) So I read or saw multiple articles in Russian from this specific author. Actually, the one linked in this post is a…

> saw multiple articles in Russian from this specific author. Actually, the one linked in this post is a translation. To put it bluntly, while they clearly have a background in software engineering, they are a troll. All their articles seem to have one thing in common: they look to be as controversial as possible on purpose, I don't believe them to be sincere. Is "don't be an asshole when it's actually not helping th…

> Is "don't be an asshole when it's actually not helping the other person like you told yourself if you look closely" actually controversial enough on that site to be considered a troll?

In Russia, yes. Like the OP comment author, I'm familiar with both IT cultures, and there's a dramatic differences in the amount of politeness.

I have actually seen people get into a physical fight because of work-related dispute, more than once.

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