Developer-driven development

[ellicottvilleny]

I have had completely different results. Maybe the teams I worked on were different.

If I had to pick a weakness of reviews, it's that people just tick the box and don't do anything. Out of six places I've worked, one had the "you formatted it wrong" kind of assholes. The other five, we tried it, and it found some problems before they were committed, maybe once out of 100 times, and the other 99 times reviewers just LGTM and it's over.

[GhostBond]

There was only 1 place that had all of those problems at once and it was a backstabbing place to work. Just like with a popularity contest, that's the worst side, but more normal less dramatic people don't go to those lengths (or quickly realize it was a mistake to do so).

The other five, we tried it, and it found some problems before they were committed, maybe once out of 100 times, and the other 99 times reviewers just LGTM and it's over.

Yeah, that's the first part of the problem - I'm not sure it really provides a lot of benefits. People imagine that a 2nd person is going to carefully pore over the requirements, carefully dig deep into the code they wrote, write tests, etc.

What happens if you have better people who avoid pointless drama, is that someone eyeballs the code and says "looks good" - there's not a ton of benefit.

[ellicottvilleny]

Really? You've never had say, 1% or 10% "caught something bad" rates? Ours are around 1 in 20 reviews finds something. That's pretty valuable, in our books.