[throwaway2037]

The last sentence is an overreach to me, but I have experienced much of the same bike-shedding during code reviews. 95% of them are useless. Read that twice; I am not joking, sadly. I am not against code reviews, but in my experience(!), the reviewers are not incentivized to do a thorough job. Seriously, if you deliver a new feature vs do a deep, difficult code reviews, which one benefits you more? To repeat: I don't like it; I am only pointing out the perverse incentives to rush during code reviews.

One more thing that I don't see enough people talking about here: Writing good software is as much about human relationships (trust!) as it is about the computer code itself. When you have a deeply trusted, highly competent teammate, it is normal to put less effort into the review. And to be clear, I am talking about the 99% scenarios of writing the same old CRUD corporate code that no one gets excited about here. Please don't reply to this post with something like, "Well, I work on Dragon at SpaceX and all branches have 2x code coverage and the QA team has 600 years of combined experience... Yada..."

[peteradio]

One 1 hour doing code review is not really stolen from doing feature work really is it? For the vast majority its stolen from playing video games or some other non-work.

[Jevon23]

That heavily depends on the individual developer and the organization in question.

In general, the most highly skilled developers who are most capable of doing a thorough code review are also the ones who are most likely to be genuinely over capacity as is.

[eacapeisfutuile]

That is very subjective, and far from what I’ve seen.