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This varies highly depending on the organization. I've worked at places that do it both ways. Particularly in small places when resources are tight, teams are distributed, or there is a non-code safety measure in place (e.g. Business decisions are made ex-post of the code running dependent on the quality of its output), code reviews pre-deployment may not be necessary and can even be harmful (due to wasted resources).

This was far enough in the past that code reviews and "Don't deploy on Friday" weren't necessarily taken as standard practice at a lot of companies yet. But yes, we all learned :-)

Sure, and I don't see them blaming Brian in any way.