On: Code reviews: A success story

[hnlurker22]

The author describes how his code reviews that he gave others are successful from his own point of view.

[pavel_lishin → hnlurker22]

But he does back it up with actual facts (as far as we can trust the author to tell the truth) - the feature that the author gave feedback on shipped without any issues. (The article actually doesn't say whether A was fixed-and-bug-free before B shipped, but it certainly sounds like B was less stressful to ship.)

[IMTDb → pavel_lishin]

It’s also a biased view. The author admit that the feature he was involved in took longer to ship initially. Depending on the environment this can be an anti-pattern; don’t we say “release early, release often”.

In the same vein; the author says that the other feature took several releases to be stable. Were the other release purely bug fixes or did that give the engineer a chance to get early feedback and incorporate that into the feature ?

It’s clear that the author prefers a slow and careful approach, and he judges “success” and “failure” by that metric. It sometimes is the right approach. It sometimes isn’t.

[jmmv → hnlurker22]

Yes, these were my reviews. But this is from the point of view of the reviewee. I’m telling the story of what this person felt and later told me.

[awkward → hnlurker22]

Don't worry, he also asked his own reviewee, who said the reviews were helpful and in no way obnoxious.

[jmmv → awkward]

I did not ask. This is feedback that the reviewee gave me years after we both left Google.

[hnlurker22 → awkward]

My statement still stands true regardless. Not worried.