
Unlearning toxic behaviors in a code review culture - whack
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/unlearning-toxic-behaviors-in-a-code-review-culture-b7c295452a3c/
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armenarmen
“Toxic” is apparently a synonym of vague or unhelpful

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cma
It has examples like someone leaving a code review comment that says:

"Did you even test this code before you checked it in?"

Which while it itself labels it unhelpful, also seems to be pretty toxic.

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gridlockd
Sound recommendations, but what if I claimed that code reviews are
overwhelmingly a waste of time? At best, they catch a handful of problems that
should've been caught earlier, but they are far more likely to create more
issues, especially interpersonal ones which are far harder to fix than bugs in
code. All code reviews are ultimately criticism and while it's really hard to
deliver criticism well in person, it's pretty much impossible to do so in
text, even with the best of intentions.

A fundamental problem is that code review brings _more_ human factors into the
process. You pretty much never want that. Your whole job as a programmer boils
down to removing as many human factors as possible. If that idea bothers you,
perhaps you're in the wrong profession.

Instead, foster a culture of code ownership and responsibility. Assume that an
owner can work without reviews, and that a reviewer is not realistically going
to be able to improve upon that meaningfully while staying cost positive.

This goes against ideas like guarding against "the bus factor". You may
consider guarding against the bus factor by occasionally assigning actual
programming tasks (not just "code reading") to developers ordinarily working
on other things, but those should be focused events, not part of the everyday
process of actually getting stuff done. In any case, "bus factor events" are
rare and humans are prone to buy overpriced insurance against rare events.

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ohithereyou
>what if I claimed that code reviews are overwhelmingly a waste of time?

Are you saying, categorically, that they're always a waste of time?

I work in a regulated field (medical devices), and it is my experience that,
with a culture of safety and quality minded individuals, that code reviews are
always a net positive.

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muro
I like terse comments (extra space) more than the fluffy (Looks like you have
extra space at the end of line...).

