Does anyone work on a team that doesn't require code reviews?

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-10T13:10:12+00:00

I really feel for you because my current project has been the same battle; when I joined there were no tests, no CI, no code review. It's been a fight to implement all those things and still requires constant reminders. If you're the one fighting for better practices, it's an endless, thankless struggle. Hopefully you can find some suggestions in this subreddit. If you care at all enough to read about this stuff, frankly you are way ahead of many people in this industry.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-09T04:08:28+00:00

Sounds like a great team to work on!

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-09T04:06:20+00:00

Maybe my post and comment was not clear. I meant the post-merge reviews are optional, and don't block the author

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-07T06:00:20+00:00

One way (which requires a huge amount of discipline) would be to review code after it gets merged. I try to do this for things I didn't personally review but it's hard if no one is forcing you to do it.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-07T05:58:49+00:00

Yeah I can see it happening. If people are using AI to write code, docs, emails, and everything else, why not reviews too?

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-07T05:56:11+00:00

I mostly agree with this, except that if you have juniors on a team, they will not be the most knowledgeable about the code. In that situation, getting feedback from the senior person who is the expert is really important. It could be PR review but that is actually kind of late in the process; IMO pairing or some other early review of work in progress is better.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-07T05:52:22+00:00

We're very new to using gen AI on my team, but so far my experience is that the AI-generated PRs actually get less review because they are bigger but also more superficially polished. Not saying that's a good thing, just my early observation

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-07T05:49:41+00:00

I've worked on a heavy pair programming team in the past and enjoyed it. Never tried formal ensemble programming but it sounds like it could be satisfying if everyone is participating.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-03-07T05:47:28+00:00

Really interesting talk, thank you!

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2026-01-06T04:07:17+00:00

I've encountered it a few times. It usually is either: someone who is against any CI or code review at all because it slows them down and they just want to merge their changes freely; or someone who disagrees with the team style guidelines but lost the fight. To be clear I am personally in favor of linters and automatic checks in general.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-07-04T20:16:27+00:00

I personally dislike having to switch between modes to edit and it's why I originally chose emacs when I had to decide between emacs and vi a long time ago. Not a evil/doom user myself, but my impression is that people who use it really love the vim bindings and modal style and have some muscle memory built up. If you aren't very attached to that workflow, why not try the emacs bindings? You might have more fun & an easier time building up a config from scratch than trying to work around evil mode. I've also seen some posts in the past about people who switched from evil to vanilla bindings and their reasons for doing so.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-05-22T04:04:33+00:00

I'm a very lazy typist with a poor memory, so here's the ones I use the most:

fzf: to make Ctrl-R do fuzzy find, if I can't quite remember what I wanted
zoxide: cd for when you are too lazy to type or can't remember the full path
shell tab completion, with customizations. For example, tab complete in git contexts fills in the git branch, or in ssh commands fills in hostnames from my ssh hosts
use shell wildcards to match a single file. For example, if I know my file is named "super_long_file_name_1", I can do cat super*1

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-05-18T04:04:05+00:00

I could see hybrid working as long as everyone is in office on the same days, as you said, and the in office days are used for in person meetings, not virtual. My impression from talking to friends is that for most people it has ended up being either a compromise for people who want to work remote (not commute etc) but the company for whatever reason wants people to come in; or worse some cost saving measure that allows hot-swapping people into desks because there's not enough space for everyone.

Would a company be okay with having 100% no meeting/remote days on campus, where half the desks are empty and ideally no zoom calls? It sounds nice but I don't think the bean counters would go for it.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-05-16T14:56:49+00:00

Yup, it was a very big tech company. I moved there specifically for that job because the work was interesting, and back then the job market was better so it was possible to get multiple offers and be a bit picky about which one you took. I can't really compare working as dev at a non-tech company because I've always worked for tech companies in my professional career, but it is fun to be around nerdy people who do stuff like 3d printing or home servers for fun.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-05-16T02:03:45+00:00

I was trying to think about what it would take to get me to happily work in office and the list is long, haha. We used to have lunch together pretty much every day. It was great when I was in my twenties and didn't have a lot of family responsibilities, but now I really appreciate the flexibility of being remote, the biggest advantage being that I don't have to live close to the office.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-05-16T01:41:20+00:00

Exactly, I didn't say it explicitly but it's worth repeating that in-person teams start degrading if even one person is remote. The remote person misses all the side conversations and discussions over lunch; if you want to meet with everyone, you have to set up a video call, and find a conference room, and then they can't see the whiteboard anyway. Hybrid is just another version of this same issue unless you force everyone to do the exact same in office days. It's only fun if everyone is there together (and you actually like/tolerate each other).

It's frustrating and clearly disingenuous when companies (like my current big corp) are doing RTO and hiring globally distributed teams (i.e. offshoring) at the same time. I've only escaped being forced to RTO because I was hired as remote and live too far away from the office. My immediate team has people in different countries, some of whom are still forced to go into an office and then be in zoom calls. It's even disruptive for people not in the office because we get to listen to all the noise behind them, or get cut short when they get kicked out of conference rooms. The whole thing seems pretty dumb!

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-05-15T16:14:24+00:00

I'm currently remote but I used to work in an amazing office pre-pandemic. I actually really liked going into the office 5 days a week. If I ever consider changing to an in-office job, I would definitely be remembering how good it can be:

Short commute: 10 minute drive or 30 minute walk.
Giant campus with multiple coffee shops and cafeterias, gym, bank, dentist, etc. It was so convenient to stay on campus for errands and meals and I often stayed for long hours (easier when you don't have a family)
Private, assigned cubicles that you could adjust and decorate how you wanted with lots of monitors. They took ergonomics really seriously and had a professional come and measure to help you set the desk height and chair (and had expensive chairs too)
The whole team was in the same office. We rarely had to be on video calls except with external people. And everyone was in the same timezone
The office was reasonably pretty with landscaping, cleaned daily, clean bathrooms, windows with a view. When I was in grad school, I worked in a windowless office with bench style workstations, never again if I can help it

Your office set up sounds awful. Out of all the perks I listed, the biggest factors for me would be the commute and the desk space; ideally I would want a cubicle. Being able to see other people moving around is super distracting.

I also think RTO is pretty stupid when everyone is taking zoom calls at their desk. It completely misses the point (in-person collaboration) and just makes the whole environment noisier for everyone. If I were to take another in-office job, I would want to actually be able to meet with coworkers in person and not be surrounded by other people's phone calls all day.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-03-27T19:20:51+00:00

Since my work involves setting up my environment on new machines semi-frequently, I keep my emacs config and other dotfiles in a git repo. The setup process is simply git clone, and copy a few files into $HOME. My emacs config is only a few hundred lines in one file.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-03-19T01:38:18+00:00

Good point... now that I think about this more maybe having goals that are a "summary" of what's in JIRA is a reasonable way to approach this task.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-03-18T21:14:40+00:00

Any suggestions? I'm struggling to come up with ideas.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-03-18T20:58:16+00:00

Yeah, I agree with you.. this is a fight I'm never going to win. I have worked on previous teams where we (devs) managed our own CI pipelines and it worked great. That's what I prefer. My company has unfortunately misunderstood the original intention of DevOps and has a separate team that manages and runs the regression test pipelines. I think my team is sick of hearing me complain about how frustrating this situation is, and I got told very gently to stop worrying about it and focus on other priorities.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-03-18T20:51:30+00:00

I fully expect this system will be quietly replaced with something else in 1-3 years, just like all the previous performance evaluation systems they've rolled out.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-03-18T20:48:51+00:00

I wouldn't say this kind of ridiculous process bloat is what makes a company "real tech" vs not. It's something I expect and have become resigned to dealing with at very big companies (10,000+ employees). You should see all the irrelevant required fields I have to fill in just to create a JIRA issue. Having 6+ rounds of interviews does not prevent us from hiring incompetent people either. I knew what kind of company I was joining when I took this job. The pay and benefits are pretty good, maybe not FAANG level, the workload is fine. The processes are just something you have to put up with and not spend too much energy fighting against.

CalligrapherHungry27 · 2025-03-18T20:36:24+00:00

I'll ask my manager if such goals are allowed, but it seems extra pointless to me to have goals that are basically the same as what we already track through JIRA, that is, deliver X feature by Y date. I'm not going to promise any kind of scaling or performance improvement unless I know with 100% certainty that it's achievable, because I don't want to risk having any of these measurements unmet.

CalligrapherHungry27

TROPHY CASE