I know you are joking, but there is something about this that I really don't get. "Friends" here really means "a professional network". Many nerds despise having one or maintaining/building one. At the same time, people pour weeks/months/years of their life into optimizing their modest investment portfolios. 0.01 percentage points of yearly cost differences of some passive ETF. That surely compounds. But you know what also compounds? Knowing somebody who knows somebody who has $skill or $job_posting. In a big way. Your work comp is still the biggest source of income for most, but investing into optimizing it by broadening your network is something people don't want to do. They'd rather discuss the tax implications of nuances of some investment portfolio.
> got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn
That it requires you to buy your buddy a drink says it all. They should have taken the general issue to their higher ups, fixed it for you and then bought you a drink. Or dinner, on LinkedIn's dime.
> I have to rely on machine translation to understand English documents that have no translation. The materials in my language are about 5 to 6 years behind.
Pretty much off topic, but I strongly recommend you learn English. It takes a little bit of effort, but getting rid of that constant translation overhead will be an enormous boost for you.
If that's genuinely your attitude then your org has a problem.
Code review is slow and less fun, for the average sw eng. But for high quality work it's indispensable. So treat code reviews as a scarce resource. Optimize for code reviewer time and attention. Have your PRs the right size? Are they well described? Do you give context? Do they fit in the bigger story? Do you mix in unrelated drive-by fixes? How easy is it to deal with you once you have received comments? Do you address them promptly? Do you give your reviewers credit (if not praise) for their help? Do you give back by doing code reviews yourself with high quality feedback? There are lot of things you can do to streamline things and give code reviews the place in a teams workflow that it deserves.
It's clear they consider code review a personal activity than team activity, in the sense that they think "code review is a gate before my code can be merged" rather than "code review is a process where the team discusses, understands and improves the code".
And that's not rare in teams. Lots of teams and developers do code review wrong.
I even hear other people complain that I "block" their code review. I mean, if there are issues in your code, of course I am going to flag them, what do you think the purpose of code review is?
> Lots of teams and developers do code review wrong
In this sense, I'm not sure I've ever seen a team that does codereview "right".
In the before times, most PR feedback was stylistic, with the occasional bug identified. Now that we have ubiquitous auto-formatters/linters/CI, most PR review falls into either "you misunderstood the spec", or "I disagree with your architectural choices" - and my personal feeling is that your process ought to catch both of those well before the PR stage
Yeah, that's fair. I have spent most of my career on high-pressure teams within FAANG, where we aggressively managed-out anyone who wasn't making the grade. And now in the startup world, we apply a very aggressive hiring bar.
I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy working on teams who were routinely producing PRs that were in bad shape.
This is such a weird take. From my 5 years at Amazon, the only people I saw "managed out" were engineers who were good, it even great, at the code part of their job, but trash at working with the team. Our hiring bar was notoriously high, and it wasn't uncommon for engineers who were leads at their startup to get hired at L5.
When I was Bar Raising for promotions, I didn't review their PRs, I reviewed their Reviews. I reviewed the PRs that mentioned those reviews to see what slipped by. I looked at non-crunch time to verify they were reviewing at least as much code as their teammates.
If I saw someone 4x-ing the amount of code, they had better be 4x-ing the reviews too... if all they were leaving was stylistic formatting comments, they'd never make it to L6, unless the only thing they were reviewing was L6 code.
On your original claim, I have seen engineers put up 5x more PRs simply because they paid less attention to the quality or put less thought on each one of them.
I have seen people put up 5x more quality PRs too. But as long as they follow the good practice of doing a code review for every PR they put up (or 2 if you require 2 per PR), they got their stuff through quickly as well.
> your process ought to catch both of those well before the PR stage
We have multiple points where mistakes of any sort can be caught, and code review is one of them.
Yes, most architectural issues should be caught earlier, but some will only become evident in code: some by the dev themselves, others by reviewers.
This is only a problem if you mostly catch architecture issues at code review phase.
I’ve noticed that large PRs aren’t just a problem for human reviewers: they’re a problem for AI reviewers too.
If I submit a 100 line PR I’m likely to get some useful comments back from both humans and LLMs. In fact the LLM is likely to come back with so much feedback it gets down to the nitpicky/annoying level.
If I submit 1000+ lines in my PR, the humans either don’t have time and/or get scrolling blindness, and the AI reviewer is likely to give me a response that amounts to, “<<slaps roof>> Looks good to me bro: ship it!”
I guess they have a limited token budget for reviews so you can bamboozle them simply by blowing most or all of that budget.
The flip side of this tends to be that if 1,000 lines of code need to happen, filling the review queue up with 10x PRs each of 100 lines isn't exactly great either. The author spends a bunch of extra effort producing a raft of atomic PRs, and the reviewers get to context-switch a whole bunch (and may not end up with a clear picture of the feature end-to-end).
I think the ultimate answer to this is a stacked PR workflow (which we had at Meta), where I can cheaply maintain/review a 1,000 line PR as a stack of 10 incremental PRs. But unfortunately GitHub et al are still not quite there on this one.
I agree about how you can reciprocate for a good code review, but I'd just add that for me, code review is also fun — when done for a fellow human who I might be teaching.
> But for high quality work [a code review is] indispensable.
The argument here is that all code reviews are done with attention and care, but quality of a code review is highly dependent on the reviewer and the team’s review process, and in the real world the quality of reviews pretty much follow the same distribution curve as, say, agile project management: For the time invested in reviewing, a handful of teams get excellent utility from them, most teams get little benefit, and a sad few actually cause harm.
If most code reviews provide only a little benefit at base for most teams, recommending that most teams should also delay shipping quality work is going to sound a lot like bad advice.
I think your conclusion is upside down. Air safety is based on the "Swiss cheese" model. Multiple layers of safety nets are in place to compensate for issues in one layer. In particular, technical safeguards are there to prevent disasters if the human in the loop makes a mistake which will eventually happen. Any weakening of any technical safeguard makes the system less safe. No matter if the human ultimately made a mistake -- the technical system failing contributed to the accident just as much.
My favorite example is the introduction of speed limit on some accident-ridden stretch of the Autobahn north of Berlin. After introducing the speed limit, the accident numbers went down dramatically. What did the local administration decide? Remove the speed limit again -- cause there were no accidents anymore!
That should really be a cautionary tale for everybody accusing everyone of LLM manufacturing texts. Many people write like that. The self-censoring nowadays to try to avoid sounding like an LLM is really sth we need to grow out of.
Try that and see your champagne exports be tarriffed with 100% in no time.
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