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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

#71

Post by leepowers »

> I was, again, technically stronger. A thousand-string pull request was littered with 200 comments, not leaving the person even a faint hope in his competency. Great.

That's way too much feedback. It makes it very hard determine which problems are critical, and which come down to aesthetics or personal preference. On the flip side, if I was churning out buggy code at that rate, I'd want to know about those bugs in detail.

There's also an opportunity cost of evaluating code so tightly. Not only does it take up more of the reviewer's time, it also eats up developer time that could be spent on other features.

> The reason for these angry code reviews is obvious. As part of the team, I bear full responsibility for the project’s code base. I have to work with it later, after all. It’s a source of many issues for the business. The code doesn’t scale, can’t be tested properly, is littered with bugs. Support gets more and more expensive. It can’t be open-sourced or used to lure new developers.

Premature optimization? The mistake here is trying to optimize the legacy of your code base, possibly thinking too far ahead.

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

#72

Post by JKCalhoun »

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.

For two decades I wrote professionally and there were no code reviews at all. I had no problem with that.

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

#73

Post by JamesBarney »

marktangotango wrote: post #50
n8cpdx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've spent over 6 years working on 5+ legacy projects that had millions of lines of code and maintenance teams 30 times smaller than the army of contractors who developed them.

And I've learned all the small nit-pick maintainability issues made no difference. Whether or not there was a style guidelines, and whether or not it was enforced made little difference.

Things that really made a big difference were giant bone-headed architectural decisions like "just save persist this data as serialized text", "lets write all the business logic in stored procedures", "building the software on a terrible platform".

And having some type of identifiable domain model helped a little too.

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

#75

Post by Zababa »

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…

Same here. For me, code review is a good time to share knowledge and help other people. If a problem often comes up, I usually try to see if a tool can solve this. I'll admit that it can be really hard to know what level of tolerence people have for nitpicks and things like that, and at which point you're starting to sacrifice team spirit/people's feeling for small things.

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

#76

Post by gchamonlive »

> The universe blessed me with this trait so I can awaken the anger in other young and inexperienced coders

An important skill to develop is the ability to "read the audience". Almost prescient in nature, predicting how people will react to you is of utmost importance so that you can tailor your responses accordingly.

This is important when mentoring people because, even though tough love might work on some, it may very well destroy self esteem for others and make them shift career, ending something before it even starts.

If you are in a position of mentoring, it is your responsibility to adapt. It is painful, frustrating and a source of contempt when you try and try but you just can't seem to find the sweet spot to inspire newcomers, but as long as you persevere there is hope in teaching others.

I had a recent experience in this. I am in no way a long experienced infrastructure engineer, but I built my share of cloud applications to have an idea what can go wrong. I recently tried mentoring someone new and it was just plain frustrating. I couldn't explain too much without overwhelming him with details, and I couldn't just direct to sources without him feeling abandoned. That sweet spot of attention I couldn't reach before he requested to "learn different things" and effectively abandon infrastructure haunts me sometimes.

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

#77

Post by humbleMouse »

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.

Yea this response seems like something a crazy person would say. The first thing I tell people I am training or mentoring is “try to separate your ego from the computer”. I think that’s good advice and practice for trying to learn anything, but especially in computer work. There’s just so many situations where things should be working but they arnt because of some niche random issue. If you involve your ego in this work you will be riding an emotional rollercoaster and you will be less efficient and less effective.

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

#78

Post by myk9001 »

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 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.

And I'll give it to the author, the tactic worked great: their articles usually generated a huge discussion in comments and -- I would guess -- a lot of traffic for the site. Though people seem to got immune to it over time.

And there's probably nothing wrong with writing in a provocative style, but you might want to keep it in mind when reading the post and not take it too literally.

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

#79

Post by phendrenad2 »

dreyfan wrote: post #55
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…

> 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.

That is exactly why many harshly critique code. But I've never found their versions to be any less full of tech-debt. Usually it comes down to personal style. "Oh Brenda hates if/else, better convert it to ternary before I submit it. But Oh No! Bob is reviewing it instead! He hates ternary and always wants if/else! I'm doomed..."

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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