[vkou]

They aren't asking for you to write tests because 'it benefits them', they are asking you to write tests because as a professional engineer, you should write tests, and not just yolo it.

Look, sometimes you may have good reasons for why a test is impractical. You are allowed to push back, or look for a different reviewer. There's a hundred thousand people in the firm, you should be able to find one or two that will let you submit literally anything that compiles.

But most of the time, the reviewer is giving you advice that you should take.

[pclmulqdq]

If you are turning a button to a slightly different shade of blue and it's not a button you own, the owner of the button should not be asking you to write tests for the button.

[vkou]

If the case is as simple as you describe, surely there's more than one owner of the code that can approve this, if one guy is being unreasonable.

If there is actually only one owner that can approve changes to the package, there's something really weird and unusual about that project setup, or it's someone's internal hobby project that they wrote five years ago and semi-maintain, in which case, I have to wonder why you submitting one-liner changes to it is all that important.

We're all adults, we all work together, we can all work this out. If someone absolutely insists on being an asshole, escalate. It's why you have a manager, and why they have a manager.

My experience is that very few people are unreasonable assholes.

There's always plenty of organizational, vision, strategy, and execution problem in any billion-dollar company, but 'people are unreasonable in code reviews' is not one I'd put in the top 10. It might be something that ruins your day once or twice, but that doesn't make it systemic.

[dietr1ch]

> If someone absolutely insists on being an asshole, escalate.

That's doubling down on time spent on contributing back. It's usually cheaper to workaround the issue once you notice it'll be way harder than it should be (not hard at all).

[econ]

I would think the person is more interesting and more relevant than the button. One doesn't create hurdles when I'm trying to work. You just don't do it.

I've allowed people to build a whole obstacle course one time. Decades later it stil has me randomly burst out in laughter. It's like hoarding technical debt until nothing in the code base makes sense or even looks familiar. You just don't do that...

[ncruces]

It's as good an opportunity as any to improve things.

They're acting as selfish demanding you do something for them, as you are for refusing.