[parennoob]

The whole "we are so cool because we are ruthless. Merciless, I tell you! Once you get through our code review your code will be perfect." attitude of this article is a bit surprising for one ranked so highly on HN. Do people really prefer this kind of attitude? Bender GIFs and snarky comments can become quickly tiring.

I personally would strongly prefer if they put it in milder technical terms, "We are very conservative with deviations from our preferred code style and conventions". I suppose that wouldn't be as click-baity, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people) it would be easier to appreciate, since we understand that being conservative before accepting commits leads to a well-groomed codebase.

[thinkpad20]

I agree. I'm all for rigorous standards of code review, whether I agree with every convention in question or not. However, after the author mentions writing "beep!" instead of explaining an import order convention (as if it were challenging to copy/paste a single sentence a few times) and putting obnoxious gifs in their review, not to mention the self-congratulatory tone of the article, it doesn't make me feel like this is a place where I want to work. Encouraging best practices needn't come at a cost of being blithely pompous.

[savanaly]

Every single time I do a code review I find myself noticing a lot of little style mistakes (and, not to be overconfident, I could be mistaken myself about that) and don't leave a comment because I don't want to be that guy that no one wants to review their code and gives one a major headache because I care more about the consistency than does the person I'm reviewing.

In other words, I might restrain myself from criticism out of my compassion for my coworkers. The definition of "ruthless" according to Google is "having or showing no pity or compassion for others," so it's a fine term to describe how I'm not-- and how this company is determined to be.

[mkozlows]

As a team, decide how much you care. Some teams won't care much at all, and will follow a "hey as long as it works" attitude. Other teams will be deeply interested in making their code as good as it could be, and will want comments about doing things more cleanly or elegantly and will view PR review as a chance to learn and improve.

As long as everyone's on the same page, and sharing the same attitude, that drive to improve will come across as a positive thing rather than a jerk move. But if you're the one person with that attitude on a team of good-enoughers, yeah, not so much.

[parennoob]

Yeah I think this kind of thing is a teamwide preference. If you prefer very rigid styling and enforce a style checker, great – that can be put into a script which you compulsorily run before review.