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Comment by theonething | Hacker News Reader

> I disagree with so much of this! Though I can tell the author is coming from a lot of experience.

I bit off topic, but this sums up a lot of my experience with code reviews. People have opinions on what is the "one right way" and if I differ, we go through this drawn out discussion on Github about it. Most of the time, I see it as there are different ways to do it with different trade offs. I find myself just giving in so I can get the damned PR approved without a few days of back and forth.

Granted there are times when there is a much better way. In those cases, I very much appreciate the feedback. It's truly educational. In my experience though, most of the time, it's senior developers insisting their style/way is best.

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I think it's important for teams to establish best practices and enforce them. It's good for team cohesion and culture.

For example I've worked on teams that blocked PRs on minor typos in code comments. The signal this sent to me was "a little goes a long way, we care about the little things".

Sure enough that ended up being the cultural norm and the team benefited from that mentality. There were also downsides though! That's part of the trade-off, but the benefits of a unified "culture" outweighed the downsides by far.

What's reeeaaally bad is when you have competing points of view between tech leads and they passively enforce their own idea of what's "right" without regard for the other lead.

I agree with this. There doesn't have to be One True Way, but within the scope of shared work it's useful if there's a sense of "around her we all..." especially if the multitude of ways compliment each other so that sum is greater than whole.

Where this gets hard for me, is in transitioning between teams, contributing to open source projects etc. The dialects can get kind of discordant. At least with Elixir, I find these differences are more palatable because the basic paradigm is consistent. In the "hybrid" languages, you get competing language models in the same code base.

Agreed, this was a huge pain in the past for me. Then, the even MORE senior engineers are just like "Ok do the tests work? Yes? Ok whatever, approve"

So there's this middle section of "senior" (but still in age terms relatively junior in their lifecycle) that are just trying to exert dominance over a dumb web app that controls the flow of the spice (errmm.. code) in the org. It's really silly and deeply counterproductive.

I agree with so much of this! I think it stems from so many software engineers have a quantitative background, where solving for x is either right or wrong. Much of “good” software engineering, however, is subjective and I think many of these folks have a difficult time reconciling that. So you get into these battles on which is the best way when, unless it’s something egregious, is probably good enough.

I have a writing and liberal arts background and so while bad writing is obvious, good writing comes in many stylistic forms. I think this has allowed me to see varying perspectives on “best practices.”

I've noticed this is much more pronounced if there's been no discussion before the PR (talking more about larger decisions than what's in the bulk of code review feedback I guess). I've observed many times people being frustrated because they write some code without making sure the relevant people are happy with the overall approach, then getting torn apart in the PR.

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