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by dimal
1740 days ago
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Yeah, I was afraid I'd see myself in this post, because I'm known for giving tough reviews. But I don't. I feel terrible whenever I give a tough review. I agonize about how to say the difficult things that need to be said but do it in a way that won't sting as much, and I know that often, it's going to sting anyway. I feel like I failed for not helping the other developer know how to do things better in the first place. I'm still figuring out how to make my process more constructive, but I've got a long way to go. |
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Another thing that I think helps, at the CR stage, is asking after their thoughts for putting the thing together the way that they did. This DOES run into the potential problem of showing that they didn't put thought into it (or that part of it), but....
...there's a certain extent to which it's not your fault if they get to the CR and get a tough review. It's your organization's, "a month of work saves an hour of planning"-style. The developer who wrote the code getting the tough review wasn't set up to succeed, and IMHO that's more a comment on your org than any of the developers involved.
To bring it back around to your personal process, my (unsolicited, haha) advice is that if you're finding yourself giving a tough review, switch to a 1:1 review / pair programming session. Async text communication is hard and prone to miscommunication.