Comment by sarchertech

I’ve never worked somewhere where mandatory PR reviews didn’t turn into mostly red tape.

The pressure to get work done faster in the long term always wins out over other concerns and you end up with largely surface level speed reviews that don’t catch much of anything. At best they tend to enforce taste.

In 20 years across many companies and thousands of PRs, I’ve never had a reviewer catch a single major bug (a bug that would have required declaring an incident) that would have otherwise gone out. I've pushed a few major bugs to production, but they always made it through review.

I’ve been doing this since well before everyone was using GitHub and requiring PR reviews for every merge. I haven’t noticed a significant uptick in software quality since the switch.

The cost is high enough that I’d like to see some hard evidence justifying it. It just seems to be something people who have never done any different take on faith.