
Ask HN: I can't get my code reviewed. Now what? - codereview1561
The company doesn&#x27;t have many people that can review my code changes (infrastructure-related, terraform, Go, Ansible, etc). They are focused on PHP and Node.js.<p>However, there&#x27;s a formal rule that whoever submits a change, cannot merge it. It has to be reviewed byt someone else and merged.<p>My changes sometimes languish for 2 months at times. It&#x27;s making me depressed and management doesn&#x27;t seem to care.<p>I&#x27;m thinking about jumping ship but I was wondering if the HN crowd has better suggestions. Maybe merge my own changes and see who complains? In some repositories they don&#x27;t even give commit access to most people so that would be tricky&#x2F;impossible to do for 40% of the code base.
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brudgers
_Maybe merge my own changes and see who complains?_

To me, this is a bad idea because it has no upside. If changes can wait for
two months, then they may be important but are not urgent. But unless you
always write bug free code, something will go wrong and you will be singularly
irresponsible. To put it another way, it sounds like your organization has
adopted a sound engineering practice -- that's what code review is. That makes
going around code review _bad_ engineering at a higher level than code
quality. Engineering is creating things fit for purpose and here the purpose
is the business operations of a particular business.

If you're unhappy at your job, more conventional steps such as talking to
supervisors or looking for a new job are often more appropriate than going
cowboy. Trying to see the role of your code in the larger engineering context
or even the complete business operation might lend a useful perspective.
....gaining an understanding of why the company is both willing to pay you to
produce the code but is not rushing it into production will probably give you
a sense of what drives the organization's culture. Even if you leave, such
knowledge will provide intuition for evaluating opportunities throughout your
career because there are patterns.

Good luck.

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chadcmulligan
If there's a rule that you can't do what you're proposing to do, then you're
putting your job on the line by breaking the rules I'd guess.

It depends what field you're in and what the company is like I suppose, it
sounds like the management has other priorities at the moment, I'd just keep
raising it with them, discuss it openly, if nothing is done about it and it
bothers you then either suck it up, or find alternative employment would be my
guess.

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purrpit
If your company doesn't care about you then you shouldn't care much about
company's policies that come in your way either

I used to suffer from a similar situation. In GitHub, one can be a code owner
of a directory in the repository, in my company you cannot merge pull requests
without explicit code review and approval of the code owner or the repository
owner (CTO in my company)

Problem was that whenever I used to raise a pull request for changes in the
directory I myself was the code owner.. no one was there to approve the pull
request as one cannot review the PR one raised itself. I would just ask
someone else to raise the pull request and approve it myself and merge it ;)
Didn't want to wait for my CTOs approval and dictate my working pace. I was
always going to be accountable anyway my repositories.

Now, I'm not saying that you should go the same route, rather trying to
influence you to not feel depressed and try and find a solution to work around
the policy.

Firstly, do the obvious and keep poking who ever is incharge about your
situation.

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icedchai
Just merge it yourself. It's better to ask forgiveness than seek permission.
If anyone complains, just tell them what you told us. Likely case is you get a
"talking to." Worst case, you get the boot. Problem solved.

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hackerpacker
I've found node integrates reasonably well with linux, I would do more
infrastructure using that, though the style doesn't need to be hyper-
asynchronous usually.

