<story><title>I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I&apos;m sorry</title><url>https://habr.com/en/post/440736/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bogota</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>majormajor</author><text>&amp;gt;  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.&lt;p&gt;I really can&amp;#x27;t relate at all. I feel the opposite. I often feel angry (I realize this is not a GOOD response either!) and always feel sad. I don&amp;#x27;t want to have to do more work. I don&amp;#x27;t want a reminder that my previous feedback didn&amp;#x27;t click with them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m constantly looking for ways to do less tedious work, through automation and such, and code review for bad code is the worst sort of tedious work. I want to learn things, but code reviewing bad code doesn&amp;#x27;t teach me anything - I want to work with people who can teach me things when &lt;i&gt;they&lt;/i&gt; review &lt;i&gt;my&lt;/i&gt; code just as often as the reverse.&lt;p&gt;My takeaway from that has been to try to intercept people &lt;i&gt;earlier&lt;/i&gt; in the planning and designing and start-of-coding process. If a bunch of bad code gets to code review, someone failed at explaining what this thing needed to do and how it should be done beforehand. The article claims this is always just itself a confrontational form of argument, but... it doesn&amp;#x27;t have to be. Stop being an asshole, and find non-assholes to work with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dec0dedab0de</author><text>I am always careful to prioritize my comments during code review so I don&amp;#x27;t come off like that too often.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll say things like, &amp;quot;I would have done that like this because of this reason, but as long as it works&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;or &amp;quot;This needs to change right now because it&amp;#x27;s a security hole&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;or &amp;quot;We should find a more efficient way to do this, because as the data fills up, the users will start to notice it&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I am definitely harder on new people, and people who ask me for help when they should have been able to figure it out on their own.</text></comment>
<story><title>I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I&apos;m sorry</title><url>https://habr.com/en/post/440736/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bogota</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>majormajor</author><text>&amp;gt;  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.&lt;p&gt;I really can&amp;#x27;t relate at all. I feel the opposite. I often feel angry (I realize this is not a GOOD response either!) and always feel sad. I don&amp;#x27;t want to have to do more work. I don&amp;#x27;t want a reminder that my previous feedback didn&amp;#x27;t click with them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m constantly looking for ways to do less tedious work, through automation and such, and code review for bad code is the worst sort of tedious work. I want to learn things, but code reviewing bad code doesn&amp;#x27;t teach me anything - I want to work with people who can teach me things when &lt;i&gt;they&lt;/i&gt; review &lt;i&gt;my&lt;/i&gt; code just as often as the reverse.&lt;p&gt;My takeaway from that has been to try to intercept people &lt;i&gt;earlier&lt;/i&gt; in the planning and designing and start-of-coding process. If a bunch of bad code gets to code review, someone failed at explaining what this thing needed to do and how it should be done beforehand. The article claims this is always just itself a confrontational form of argument, but... it doesn&amp;#x27;t have to be. Stop being an asshole, and find non-assholes to work with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_gqoa</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious to know if you or anyone else reading this has run into the opposite problem. Or maybe I&amp;#x27;m just &amp;quot;that guy&amp;quot; although I am reasonably certain that I am not.&lt;p&gt;As a rule, so far throughout my 5 year career as a full stack web developer, my coworkers have neither understood or cared about what clean code entails.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t berate, I don&amp;#x27;t criticize, I&amp;#x27;ve taken to mentioning it once and then doing my utmost to never mention it again in an attempt to avoid labeling myself as the odd one out.&lt;p&gt;Granted, I&amp;#x27;ve turned down a handful of much higher paying (and presumably higher quality teams) for various reasons. At first, it was because I was a bootcamper and high paying jobs are difficult to pick up out of the gate without the appropriate piece of paper. Since then, I&amp;#x27;ve worked for various organizations on a consulting basis, and most recently landed at an early stage YC startup. Pay isn&amp;#x27;t great, but I have aspirations to start my own startup, so I&amp;#x27;m cool with the pay cut for now in return for the opportunity to learn the ropes, business wise. Founder knows what he&amp;#x27;s doing at least.&lt;p&gt;But the devs, man. They just don&amp;#x27;t care. 500-1500 line React function components are the norm. No standardized way for retrieving data from the back-end. I dread assignments that require me to modify or otherwise integrate with previously written code, because the best way I can come up with to figure out what the fuck is going on is to rewrite it sanely. I&amp;#x27;m being a little hyperbolic, I do my best to avoid rewriting wherever possible, but I&amp;#x27;m not mis-characterizing things by much.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s honestly depressing, especially considering I&amp;#x27;ve had multiple other teams offer &lt;i&gt;triple&lt;/i&gt; what I&amp;#x27;m making right now, but neither of them were pre-seed startup SAAS companies which this one is, so here I stay for the time being.&lt;p&gt;Invariably, I garner a reputation as &amp;quot;that guy&amp;quot; on any team I work on, although granted this is only the second multi-dev team I&amp;#x27;ve ever worked on. Still though, it feels terrible to get a bad reputation for writing good code. Founder likes my work ethic and output though, so I guess I&amp;#x27;ve got that going for me.&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this turned into a bit of a rant, it just started pouring out, ha!</text></comment>