[bcoates]

Agreed, particularly on code reviews: the only useful code reviews I've had were either in an outright trainee/expert relationship or when the reviewer is very experienced in the gotchas of the project being modified and the reviewer is new.

Peer and near-peer reviews have always wound up being nitpicking or perfunctory.

An alternative that might work if you want two hands on every change for process reasons is to have the reviewer do something closer to formal QA, building and running the changed code to verify it has the expected behavior. That has a lot of limitations too, but it least it doesn’t degrade to bikeshedding about variable name aesthetics.