Comment by jrowen

Comment by jrowen 4 days ago

Part of the problem is that businesses treat reviewing as a second class citizen. It's not "actual work" so shouldn't be given preference, which excuses the LGTM style reviews.

I've been out of the industry for a while but I felt this way years ago. As long as everybody on the team has coding tasks, their review tasks will be deprioritized. I think the solution is to make Code Reviewer a job and hire and pay for it, and if it's that valuable the industry will catch on.

I would guess that testing/QA followed a similar trajectory where it had to be explicitly invested in and made into a job to compete for or it wouldn't happen.

godelski 4 days ago

I can be totally wrong, but I feel like that's a thing that sounds better on paper. I'm sure there's ways to do this correctly but every instance I've seen has created division and paid testers/QC less. Which I'd say the lower pay is a strong signal of it being considered second class. Has anyone seen this work successfully?

I also think there's benefits to review being done by devs. They're already deep in the code and review does have a side benefit of broadening that scope. Helping people know what others are doing. Can even help serve as a way to learn and improve your development. I guess the question is how valuable these things are?

Reply View 0 replies

sfink 4 days ago

I don't see a lot of value in generic code reviewers. I want the reviewers to be actively engaged in writing somewhat related code themselves, otherwise the value of their opinions will decline over time.

As for prioritization... isn't it enough knowing that other people are blocked on your review? That's what incentivizes me to get to the reviews quickly.

I guess it's always going to depend a lot on your coworkers and your organization. If the culture is more about closing tickets than achieving some shared goal, I don't know what you could do to make things work.

Reply View 1 reply

jrowen 4 hours ago

Someone brought up the point that more people will be doing more reviewing as more code is written by AI.
If your job description is reviewing the codebase and every change that goes into it, you will be actively engaged. Whoever the most fervent auditor of new packages/libraries is on the team, they're probably de facto doing this role. Whoever has the deepest knowledge actually, just let them observe/edit.

Reply View | 0 replies