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by breckenedge 15 days ago
I agree with this take for experienced and capable engineering teams. Three times over the last three years, I have told my senior engineers to skip code review, and nothing catastrophic happened, and recovery from bugs was rapid. Three times I have been told by engineering management to reimplement code review. Now that management is either gone or about to be gone.
4 comments
ozim 15 days ago
It is a bit frustrating when you want to do risk based approach but then it is much more work to explain it to people who don’t know better but they want a checkbox or read on the internet “that’s proper way of doing things”.

Another example is password complexity rules, we try to use latest recommendations with no forcing of PW change, no requirements beside length - but then there will be customer that will make fuss that we don’t have it as as it is compliance check box to have complex PW.

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RHSeeger 15 days ago
Skipping code reviews and the bugs it causes can be a problem, or it can be easily solvable later when the bugs are found. It varies a lot.

Skipping code reviews and the poor code that can happen because nobody took a second look - that's more of a problem. Because 6-12 months down the line, there's not a few bugs that need to be fixed. Instead, there's a horrible code base that causes all _future_ development to be a lot slower.

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AlfeG 15 days ago
Few times bugs causes unrecoverable data - and code review are needed again.
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ozim 15 days ago
You have engineers that can say “hey this DB change might be risky let’s take second person to review it”.

No one is forbidding reviews.

But if you have a junior pushing code that can cause unrecoverable data loss his code should be reviewed.

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KaiserPro 15 days ago
New CEO walks into the office for the first day. Looks at the budget to see what they can do to "Make a mark"

[Budget proposal officer]: "Here is the new cleaning budget"

[CEO]: "looks around the office, the office is clean, why do we need cleaners? much less expensive cleaners"

[Budget proposal officer]: "The cleaners keep the office clean though"

[CEO]: "Nonsense! I read a substack about this, lets get rid of the cleaners"

//Six months later in an ALL hands//

[CEO]: "Look I know that we have had issues, The washing facilities were sub standard, and in some cases people were poisoned by poor hygene. We have insistuted a new mandatory training called `keeping the office clean, you're the first link in the chain` to help keep everyone happy and healthy"

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