I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by MisterBastahrd » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #38

majormajor wrote: post #31

> 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…

My reaction to this was that this guy should not be making code reviews ever. That emotional reaction in combination with conviction everyone has the same one disqualify him.

I wouldn't even want that guy on my team as a junior, because he's a headache waiting for a place to happen.

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

#42

Post by mrtranscendence » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

I'm not a super-coder; give me a JS project of moderate complexity and I'd have no idea what's going on or what I'm supposed to do with it. But as a data scientist I do have the reputation of being good at coding even among some of the engineers at my company.

And some of the code produced by both data scientists and engineers ... it's, hm, not great? Just between you and me? So I'm glad I've never had the inclination to tear anyone to shreds. Indeed, part of my job used to be to help people with their coding problems, and I loved doing that.

But sometimes when I'm reviewing code ... it's very hard to bite my lip and not call out every little issue, even though it would just be too much and most of the "problems" aren't actually very important. I try to impress upon people that developing good code is useful when I lead training sessions, but it's hard, especially for people who'd rather be doing data science than coding.

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

#43

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

Funny. I'd say that if somebody can't work with or maintain code written by others then that's the sign of a weak programmer. If all code you work with has to be written exactly as if you wrote it yourself then that's a weakness.

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

#44

Post by marktangotango » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

backoncemore wrote: post #27

billycorben2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange, I’m on a team rn with people who just approve everything. I’m craving some constructive feedback.

The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Too laissez-faire and you end up with a ball of mud.

Super critical code review culture can also end up with balls of mud. The two are not exclusive. Example is a team I was on that would critique the hell out of syntax and grammar in javadocs, formatting of annotations arguments, stuff like that, fine. But never look outside the source file for how any of it fit together. No design planning cause "code reviews". End result was tons of duplicated code everywhere.

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

#45

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

watt wrote: post #21

adamnemecek wrote: post #3

God he sound insufferable.

The russian version is somewhat self-deprecating in tone, the translation is not doing good job conveying it.

Thank you for saying that. I read the piece because of your comment and hopefully understood it a bit better because of it.

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

#46

Post by nyczomg » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

backoncemore wrote: post #9

Nothing makes working at a place more unbearable than having to deal with someone that gives an excessive amount of criticism on working code, at least that's how I feel. I've been in that situation before and it made me never want to submit pull requests. It made me even madder when other developers, whose code was no better than mine but had been at the company longer, received basically no critiques. Some might sa…

Not only that, but the title of the post is, "I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry".

This person is so confident in himself, that he thinks his code review takedowns are so brutal, yet effective, that he is ruining lives. It almost comes off as "I'm so handsome that I ruin people's lives with my looks and I'm sorry."

And then there is this...

"I was mad that, while I spent my nights learning F#, my daughter started calling everyone around “fathers”. And this guy, instead of getting better at his job, went home to his children. And I wanted to punish him."

Uh, whose life is being ruined?

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

#47

Post by neo2006 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

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.

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

#48

Post by mrtranscendence » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

clarle wrote: post #37

Having an auto-formatter like Prettier or `go fmt` has been a huge boon and productivity gain for the teams that I've worked with. No longer having code nitpicks on formatting has saved so much time going through reviews, and it really increases the signal to noise ratio on pull request comments too. Would definitely recommend those for any teams that have a similar teammate as the article author on their team.

Yeah, we mostly do Python and I've really been trying to push the use of black. I don't actually like some of black's formatting choices (OK, it's grown on me) but it's better to have a standard and stick to it.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

billycorben2 wrote: post #16

backoncemore wrote: post #9

Nothing makes working at a place more unbearable than having to deal with someone that gives an excessive amount of criticism on working code, at least that's how I feel. I've been in that situation before and it made me never want to submit pull requests. It made me even madder when other developers, whose code was no better than mine but had been at the company longer, received basically no critiques. Some might sa…

Strange, I’m on a team rn with people who just approve everything. I’m craving some constructive feedback.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by marktangotango » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

n8cpdx wrote: post #10

blahyawnblah wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to "destroy" every PR from a developer, you're wasting more time (money) than it would take to replace them. Why should be bad PRs ever be allowed for any reason?

There are many ways to solve any problem. If I reviewed every PR with the standard "is this exactly how I would have done it", I too would be destroying every PR I review. And I'm not even that good at coding - I'm the type of generalist who cares about things like the business beyond the code base. What really matters is whether the code is solid and whether it will actually cause problems. Just because a PR isn't c…

> If I reviewed every PR with the standard "is this exactly how I would have done it",

This, too many people think their way is the only way. It only takes one cancelled project or one company going bankrupt (and 100,000s loc going "poof") to understand this work we do, really doesn't matter all that much in the end.