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In some companies, (ahem… Amazon), engineers are judged by their code review/comment ratio. Especially L4 engineers trying to make it to L5.

So actually putting positive comments in the code review isn’t really much appreciated.

I gained this habit and now for me, a comment is a suggestion of improvement, I deliver praise out-of-band.

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> engineers are judged by their code review/comment ratio

It's a horrible practice with adverse incentives, and one of the reasons I'm glad I no longer work there

(and easily gameable, anyways - people would just DM each other patches they were unsure of, before submitting an actual CR)

The more I learn about how the bigger companies do business, the happier I am my dreams of working for them never materialized. I encounter enough stupid things caused by businesses trying to measure difficult things. I would hate to work in a place where the proper mode of conduct – praise in public, criticize in private – is flipped on its head for the purposes of someone's spreadsheet.

It was definitely a bad system that leads to wrong incentives.

Due to this, a lot of the time, leaving a comment would lead to friction with the owner of the CR, thus disincentivizing leaving comments, which leads to worse code being merged.

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