Comment by jbmsf
Recently, I've been wondering about the point of code review as a whole.
When I started my career, no one did code review. I'm old.
At some point, my first company grew; we hired new people and started to offshore. Suddenly, you couldn't rely on developers having good judgement... or at least being responsible for fixing their own mess.
Code review was a tool I discovered and made mandatory.
A few years later, everyone converged on GitHub, PRs, and code review. What we were already doing now became the default.
Many, many years layer, I work with a 100% remote team that is mostly experienced and 75% or more of our work is writing code that looks like code we've already written. Most code review is low value. Yes, we do catch issues in review, especially with newer hires, but it's not obviously worth the delay of a review cycle.
Our current policy is to trust the author to opt-in for review. So far, this approach works, but I doubt it will scale.
My point? We have a lot of posts about code review and related tools and not enough about whether to review and how to make reviews useful.
I am very much in the same position right now. My dev team has introduced mandatory code reviews for every change and I can see their output plummeting. It also seems that most code reviews done are mostly syntax and code format related - noone actually seems to run the code or look at the actual logic if it makes sense.
I think its easy to add processes under the good intention of "making the code more robust and clean", but I never heard anyone discuss what is the cost of this process to the team's efficiency.