It's one of the things I'm most pleased about at my current gig that reviews are in general collegial rather than adversarial. I wish I had a magic blog-post-l

It's one of the things I'm most pleased about at my current gig that reviews are in general collegial rather than adversarial. I wish I had a magic blog-post-length formula for how that happened. I don't. I know I personally talk about it in interviews, and we hire for developers who think about development as a team sport rather than a solo FPS rampage, and we talk about code review sort of a lot in onboarding. The way I explain it to noobs is that a collegial review culture is a question of trust. When we all believe that we are all on the same team with the same goals, we feel safe, and we can trust that (1) critical feedback we receive from others is intended just to improve the code, not to score points on us personally, and (2) if we give feedback that is critical, it will be received in that spirit as well. And it's our responsibility to give critical feedback where the code under review doesn't meet our standards of efficiency, readability, and maintainability. Grandstanding or mean-spirited reviews break down the team-wide spirit of trust and the feeling of safety; they are a far greater danger to the integrity of the code base than a badly-coded method or spotty test suite.