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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

#91

Post by ALittleLight »

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…

I got annoyed by people leaving "philosophical" or "style" type comments in code reviews - i.e. nothing related to functionality or performance but just different ideas about how things could be written without obvious advantages. Then I realized I could just write something like "Thanks for the feedback. I've addressed the points that I feel are critical, the remaining comments can be addressed in future if necessary". Then I'd just ignore the worthless comments.

My mental model is that some people feel like they must comment on a code review to show that they've done something. They don't actually care, but just want to write a comment or two and you can shrug those off.

If following this approach you do need to be careful to only ignore genuinely useless comments though. Often a good way to tell is just to chat with the reviewer. That has the added benefit of the reviewer learning that useless comments will create more for them because you'll be by to chat about their useless comments.

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

#92

Post by wilburTheDog »

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…

>Stop being an asshole, and find non-assholes to work with.

I think the process of realizing he needs to do that and doing it is what he's describing in his article. Generally people don't open up about how their behavior is toxic unless they recognize it as a problem. And, though my experience with Russian culture is limited, I understand that competitiveness and criticism is the rule, at least in the STEM fields there. So this guy has been behaving the same way (most) everyone else does, but now he's realizing it's bad and trying to fix himself. I don't think he deserves the criticism he's getting in the comments here. We all start somewhere, and trying to improve should always be encouraged.

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

#95

Post by OneEyedRobot »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #72
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.

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

I did it for three decades (3.5?) and the only code reviews were with friends of mine who worked at multiple companies together. The whole point of the review was to find outright errors, not to optimize. Scarcely any ego involvement.

It worked out fine I think and, mind you, it used to be a lot harder to push out a fix. A lot harder.

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

#96

Post by jimmyvalmer »

jp57 wrote: post #63

I had an experience in my first year of grad school that has informed my code reviews and my general attitude toward reviewing others' work ever since. I was taking a graduate-level introduction to mathematical logic. In the class we learned about a bunch of different propositional axiomatic proof systems, and then we proved properties like soundness and completeness for them. The class was organized around class par…

tldr; there's not one way to solve a problem.

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

#97

Post by kbenson »

myk9001 wrote: 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 the other person like you told yourself if you look closely" actually controversial enough on that site to be considered a troll?

Honestly, the article comes across to me as someone publicly acknowledging their shortcomings in an attempt to combat them. If that's trolling Russian developers that frequent that site... maybe they deserve to be trolled in that way?

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

#98

Post by raffraffraff »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #20
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.

Not to be rude - but... have you asked for it?

I don't think it's something you should have to ask for. I mean if you went to a nightclub and the doorman let you in, would you say "Hey, aren't my shoes a little out of fashion?". To beat the analogy to death, I suppose if I was walking into a nightclub naked, on fire and carrying a bomb, I'd be a bit worried about the establishment of the doorman didn't refuse me.

So: is your code naked, on fire and carrying a bomb?

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

#99

Post by AnimalMuppet »

neo2006 wrote: 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 does. But someone else reading it can sometimes see the holes that you don't see.

Assuming that person X writes bug-free code is bad, whether X is "you", "me", or "that co-worker".

I don't have to be better than the PR author. I just have to be decently good, and be a different person. That's enough.

And of course I'm looking for bugs. That's the absolute first thing to look for!

Now, true, if I can help the author be able to see their own bugs (asking questions, maybe), then that's probably better than me just lecturing them. Teach them how to think so that they can see it themselves next time.

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

#100

Post by djangofan »

In my opinion, when doing a code review over a weaker developer, as the stronger developer you should show your strength by making commits to help them improve their pull request, instead of passing back-and-forth a bunch of passive-aggressive comments. If you are reviewing someones work and you go back and forth more than a couple times, you should step in and pro-actively help resolve. Together as a team you draw the conclusion. NOT working as a team is a aspect of a Narcissist.
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