[tmhedberg]

Well, you can always assign a different reviewer if your initial choice is taking too long. I usually try to check with my teammates to see who has time for a review before sending them my code, at least if it's something that I want to get submitted quickly. That ensures that I pick someone who will look at it sooner rather than later. Sometimes the specifics of the process require someone who is not on your immediate team to give their approval, in which case delays are more likely.

I'm an SRE, which means most of the code I write isn't directly user-facing, and thus isn't normally subject to hard external launch deadlines. That means I'm rarely rushing to push my changes through on a tight schedule. If there's a production emergency and I need to make an urgent change to avoid or mitigate an outage, there are escape hatches at our disposal to temporarily circumvent the code review system when no one is immediately available to do a review, but the need for that is pretty infrequent.

I rarely find it frustrating. On the contrary, I really appreciate Google's emphasis on code quality, even though it does come at the cost of some agility. I used to work at a company where the implementation of code reviews was generally resisted, and though we did get new code out the door faster, we ended up with some real maintenance nightmares as a result.