[maccard]

I've said this before, but I work on a team of 5 or 6 people. If I (pre covid) sent them a PR and walked over to their desk, told them it was super urgent and a tiny change just needed a rubber stamp, one of them would do it (and I would likely do the same for them). Failing that I can name a handful of developers that wouldn't be familiar with the system but will review my change because I did the same for them a few months ago (and they'll comment on stylistic/clarity issues, rather than the work being done). Even if you think this is rare, it likely isn't and likely happens at every company to some degree.

[yenwel]

I've worked at a mediacorp in user authentication team where one rogue junior developer from another team (with the most seniority though at that company subdividion because everybody else left) went behind my back to pressure my junior colleague to merge a pr in our codebase which opened a security hole in the back end because he was working together with a project lead who promised to deliver something that we couldn't.

[maccard]

Exactly. Even if it didn't have a security issue, one developer going to a trusted dev on another team and saying "hey, it's the week before Christmas/9pm on a Friday night, nobody else is here, I really need this merge, it's low risk and can go out in the next rollout but QA need to check it this weekend/I'm off next week/<insert some business reason applicable here>" will often result in a thumbs up.