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> If a guy brings me his code, and it has mistakes, it brings insane pleasure from how smart I feel [...] And if you tell me that you haven’t had this feeling

> If a guy brings me his code, and it has mistakes, it brings insane pleasure from how smart I feel [...] And if you tell me that you haven’t had this feeling ever, then you’re lying. Tell me about higher goals, training rookies and all that — I know you’re simply too full of themselves. And if you try to tell me that you learned to defeat that feeling (however it manifests in you), then I must be a pink unicorn. I really can't relate at all. I feel the opposite. I often feel angry (I realize this is not a GOOD response either!) and always feel sad. I don't want to have to do more work. I don't want a reminder that my previous feedback didn't click with them. I'm constantly looking for ways to do less tedious work, through automation and such, and code review for bad code is the worst sort of tedious work. I want to learn things, but code reviewing bad code doesn't teach me anything - I want to work with people who can teach me things when they review my code just as often as the reverse. My takeaway from that has been to try to intercept people earlier in the planning and designing and start-of-coding process. If a bunch of bad code gets to code review, someone failed at explaining what this thing needed to do and how it should be done beforehand. The article claims this is always just itself a confrontational form of argument, but... it doesn't have to be. Stop being an asshole, and find non-assholes to work with.

watwut 5y ago
My reaction to this was that this guy should not be making code reviews ever. That emotional reaction in combination with conviction everyone has the same one disqualify him.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  I wouldn't even want that guy on my team as a junior, because he's a headache waiting for a place to happen.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I'd expect a neatly-worded blogpost on the company Medium: "I Destroyed Our 55m User Database, But Here's What I Learned:"
- humbleMouse 5y ago
  Yea this response seems like something a crazy person would say. The first thing I tell people I am training or mentoring is “try to separate your ego from the computer”. I think that’s good advice and practice for trying to learn anything, but especially in computer work. There’s just so many situations where things should be working but they arnt because of some niche random issue. If you involve your ego in this work you will be riding an emotional rollercoaster and you will be less efficient and less effective.
- PicassoCTs 5y ago
  The process is hated by those who do it good and loved by those who get to feel superior- by the physics of work, the process filters for asshats.
tux3 5y ago
It is possible that the person is accidentally projecting their internal state as a model of how other people feel when they do code review. It's easy to accidentally fall into that trap. I've probably made that mistake before. The truth is that people's emotions can be a lot more different from yours than people may be willing to imagine. No one is perfect. But not everyone derives 'insane pleasure' from criticizing, either. And if you do, that may not be obvious. I agree with the 'stop being an asshole' line, but to do that we need to help people realize when their qualia is way out of the ordinary. If you think everyone else is power-tripping, too, then will you think you're really being an asshole, or are you just doing what everyone else does? It's scary to think that you might have something else you think everyone else does, but is really just you accidentally being oblivious. Speaking for myself, I'm going to try to be more mindful of this trap in the future.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
> I was mad that, while I spent my nights learning F#, my daughter started calling everyone around “fathers”. And this guy, instead of getting better at his job, went home to his children. And I wanted to punish him. This reads like American Psycho. I can't believe this guy is for real. You have nothing but your job, so - at your job - you try to make everyone you work with miserable? What? Why? Have you considered trying to make your life enjoyable ever?
- baryphonic 5y ago
  *Russian American Psycho
Zababa 5y ago
Same here. For me, code review is a good time to share knowledge and help other people. If a problem often comes up, I usually try to see if a tool can solve this. I'll admit that it can be really hard to know what level of tolerence people have for nitpicks and things like that, and at which point you're starting to sacrifice team spirit/people's feeling for small things.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  That's why I love pipeline integrated scans that point out issues like excessive cognitive overhead (big fat if/else waterfall with loops everywhere) or "code smells" so the team doesn't get bogged down in munitia during code reviews. If someone needs help getting a piece of code tested to 100% or resolving a code smell they can reach out or bring it up in a standup.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JamesBarney 5y ago
The other thing to keep in mind is that most code is fine. When one company buys another the quality of the code is a calculation in the sales price. But it's a small one, and it takes a real dumpster fire to move that needle.
bogota 5y ago
I have worked with people like the author. They suck. They destroy entire teams and often times the feedback is 99% pedantic personal preferences because why would they do something useful like setup the linter and propose the silly things they always nit pick. These people don’t last long and I have gotten pretty good at screening out this personality in interviews after having it cause huge issues at two different places I worked.
- morgancmartin 5y ago
  I'm curious to know if you or anyone else reading this has run into the opposite problem. Or maybe I'm just "that guy" although I am reasonably certain that I am not. As a rule, so far throughout my 5 year career as a full stack web developer, my coworkers have neither understood or cared about what clean code entails. I don't berate, I don't criticize, I've taken to mentioning it once and then doing my utmost to never mention it again in an attempt to avoid labeling myself as the odd one out. Granted, I've turned down a handful of much higher paying (and presumably higher quality teams) for various reasons. At first, it was because I was a bootcamper and high paying jobs are difficult to pick up out of the gate without the appropriate piece of paper. Since then, I've worked for various organizations on a consulting basis, and most recently landed at an early stage YC startup. Pay isn't great, but I have aspirations to start my own startup, so I'm cool with the pay cut for now in return for the opportunity to learn the ropes, business wise. Founder knows what he's doing at least. But the devs, man. They just don't care. 500-1500 line React function components are the norm. No standardized way for retrieving data from the back-end. I dread assignments that require me to modify or otherwise integrate with previously written code, because the best way I can come up with to figure out what the fuck is going on is to rewrite it sanely. I'm being a little hyperbolic, I do my best to avoid rewriting wherever possible, but I'm not mis-characterizing things by much. It's honestly depressing, especially considering I've had multiple other teams offer triple what I'm making right now, but neither of them were pre-seed startup SAAS companies which this one is, so here I stay for the time being. Invariably, I garner a reputation as "that guy" on any team I work on, although granted this is only the second multi-dev team I've ever worked on. Still though, it feels terrible to get a bad reputation for writing good code. Founder likes my work ethic and output though, so I guess I've got that going for me. Apologies if this turned into a bit of a rant, it just started pouring out, ha!
wilburTheDog 5y ago
>Stop being an asshole, and find non-assholes to work with. I think the process of realizing he needs to do that and doing it is what he's describing in his article. Generally people don't open up about how their behavior is toxic unless they recognize it as a problem. And, though my experience with Russian culture is limited, I understand that competitiveness and criticism is the rule, at least in the STEM fields there. So this guy has been behaving the same way (most) everyone else does, but now he's realizing it's bad and trying to fix himself. I don't think he deserves the criticism he's getting in the comments here. We all start somewhere, and trying to improve should always be encouraged.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  We are all products of our environment/the past. Things change when someone says "I don't like what I've become and I don't want to be this way anymore." Those folks often get undue criticism, especially if they choose to speak up in hopes of fostering positive change in others.
friedman23 5y ago
Same, I've never felt anything like this. I find code review tedious and the only thing I really care about is if their code is properly tested or not.
ravitation 5y ago
> I want to learn things, but code reviewing bad code doesn't teach me anything - I want to work with people who can teach me things when they review my code just as often as the reverse. I mean maybe you're working on extremely repetitive code, but the idea that you don't learn anything from reviewing bad code, and hopefully writing comments designed to help not humiliate, seems pretty bad to me also... You want to learn from others who review your code, but become angry when you have to teach those whose code you review? That seems bad...
- majormajor 5y ago
  It's certainly bad to get angry - I mentioned that there. I should clarify the anger happens when it's repeated more than on a one-off. E.g. if you have the same sloppy signs for 6 months (where I can tell by reading the code that you didn't even try to run your code locally), then I'm not learning anything and I'm getting frustrated because you're clearly not taking feedback to heart. I try to avoid letting this show, but it's frustrating.
dimal 5y ago
Yeah, I was afraid I'd see myself in this post, because I'm known for giving tough reviews. But I don't. I feel terrible whenever I give a tough review. I agonize about how to say the difficult things that need to be said but do it in a way that won't sting as much, and I know that often, it's going to sting anyway. I feel like I failed for not helping the other developer know how to do things better in the first place. I'm still figuring out how to make my process more constructive, but I've got a long way to go.
- RangerScience 5y ago
  One thing that I find that helps is, instead of saying that this thing is wrong, I just put in what would be right, and I do so with little commentary; usually `code block` -> `code block`. Another thing that I think helps, at the CR stage, is asking after their thoughts for putting the thing together the way that they did. This DOES run into the potential problem of showing that they didn't put thought into it (or that part of it), but.... ...there's a certain extent to which it's not your fault if they get to the CR and get a tough review. It's your organization's, "a month of work saves an hour of planning"-style. The developer who wrote the code getting the tough review wasn't set up to succeed, and IMHO that's more a comment on your org than any of the developers involved. To bring it back around to your personal process, my (unsolicited, haha) advice is that if you're finding yourself giving a tough review, switch to a 1:1 review / pair programming session. Async text communication is hard and prone to miscommunication.
atom_arranger 5y ago
Sometimes I’ll look over PRs early on, notice the entire approach is bad, and leave a comment. People often got annoyed, they would say their PR isn’t ready yet. That’s fair, I kind of understand, my intention was to just save them time going down an incorrect path though, because I know it’s going to be difficult to convince them later they need to rework days of work. Not sure what the solution is.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  If team work isn't in the culture at your place it's very understandable they would react like that. If they don't see the benefits at your place and they've also only had bad experience with that at their previous places it's the natural defense mechanism. You could do the first step for example. Put up your own stuff for early on RFC. Invite them to work collaboratively on it with you and give early feedback and see how you react. Basically: be the role model and let them follow. Not guaranteed to work but it's one way to start some of it. Sidenote: most teams don't actually do team work. It's a bunch of people thrown together that work on more or less loosely related stuff but everyone is out for themselves. It's a matter of the environment they have to work in in most cases. Individual metrics driven productivity culture. You can't expect someone to do good team work and collaboratively come up with the best approach when their incentives from management's side is to get as many PRs merged as they can to get that bonus and a good end year rating etc.
aracena 5y ago
> I'm constantly looking for ways to do less tedious work, through automation and such, and code review for bad code is the worst sort of tedious work. What kind of automation or tools are you using for code review?
flud 5y ago
I concur. I'm not a coder but I do review things every 2 months as part of the release cycle, and whenever I see mistakes, especially silly mistakes, I don't feel smart at all, it doesn't even cross my mind. I feel, in order: disappointment - because how could they make this stupid mistake, then anger - why the f do I have to waste time to correct stupid mistakes, then a bit hateful - we need to fire this person and hire someone competent, then sometimes a bit scared - what else has this person got wrong and I missed, then a mix of all of the above. What would make me feel good, as far as reviews go, would be to say "hey, this person did this way better than I would have". Can you tell I hate doing reviews?

watwut 5y ago

My reaction to this was that this guy should not be making code reviews ever. That emotional reaction in combination with conviction everyone has the same one disqualify him.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
I wouldn't even want that guy on my team as a junior, because he's a headache waiting for a place to happen.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I'd expect a neatly-worded blogpost on the company Medium: "I Destroyed Our 55m User Database, But Here's What I Learned:"
humbleMouse 5y ago
Yea this response seems like something a crazy person would say. The first thing I tell people I am training or mentoring is “try to separate your ego from the computer”. I think that’s good advice and practice for trying to learn anything, but especially in computer work. There’s just so many situations where things should be working but they arnt because of some niche random issue. If you involve your ego in this work you will be riding an emotional rollercoaster and you will be less efficient and less effective.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
The process is hated by those who do it good and loved by those who get to feel superior- by the physics of work, the process filters for asshats.

tux3 5y ago

It is possible that the person is accidentally projecting their internal state as a model of how other people feel when they do code review. It's easy to accidentally fall into that trap. I've probably made that mistake before. The truth is that people's emotions can be a lot more different from yours than people may be willing to imagine. No one is perfect. But not everyone derives 'insane pleasure' from criticizing, either. And if you do, that may not be obvious. I agree with the 'stop being an asshole' line, but to do that we need to help people realize when their qualia is way out of the ordinary. If you think everyone else is power-tripping, too, then will you think you're really being an asshole, or are you just doing what everyone else does? It's scary to think that you might have something else you think everyone else does, but is really just you accidentally being oblivious. Speaking for myself, I'm going to try to be more mindful of this trap in the future.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

> I was mad that, while I spent my nights learning F#, my daughter started calling everyone around “fathers”. And this guy, instead of getting better at his job, went home to his children. And I wanted to punish him. This reads like American Psycho. I can't believe this guy is for real. You have nothing but your job, so - at your job - you try to make everyone you work with miserable? What? Why? Have you considered trying to make your life enjoyable ever?

baryphonic 5y ago
*Russian American Psycho

Zababa 5y ago

Same here. For me, code review is a good time to share knowledge and help other people. If a problem often comes up, I usually try to see if a tool can solve this. I'll admit that it can be really hard to know what level of tolerence people have for nitpicks and things like that, and at which point you're starting to sacrifice team spirit/people's feeling for small things.

datavirtue 5y ago
That's why I love pipeline integrated scans that point out issues like excessive cognitive overhead (big fat if/else waterfall with loops everywhere) or "code smells" so the team doesn't get bogged down in munitia during code reviews. If someone needs help getting a piece of code tested to 100% or resolving a code smell they can reach out or bring it up in a standup.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

JamesBarney 5y ago

The other thing to keep in mind is that most code is fine. When one company buys another the quality of the code is a calculation in the sales price. But it's a small one, and it takes a real dumpster fire to move that needle.

bogota 5y ago

I have worked with people like the author. They suck. They destroy entire teams and often times the feedback is 99% pedantic personal preferences because why would they do something useful like setup the linter and propose the silly things they always nit pick. These people don’t last long and I have gotten pretty good at screening out this personality in interviews after having it cause huge issues at two different places I worked.

morgancmartin 5y ago
I'm curious to know if you or anyone else reading this has run into the opposite problem. Or maybe I'm just "that guy" although I am reasonably certain that I am not. As a rule, so far throughout my 5 year career as a full stack web developer, my coworkers have neither understood or cared about what clean code entails. I don't berate, I don't criticize, I've taken to mentioning it once and then doing my utmost to never mention it again in an attempt to avoid labeling myself as the odd one out. Granted, I've turned down a handful of much higher paying (and presumably higher quality teams) for various reasons. At first, it was because I was a bootcamper and high paying jobs are difficult to pick up out of the gate without the appropriate piece of paper. Since then, I've worked for various organizations on a consulting basis, and most recently landed at an early stage YC startup. Pay isn't great, but I have aspirations to start my own startup, so I'm cool with the pay cut for now in return for the opportunity to learn the ropes, business wise. Founder knows what he's doing at least. But the devs, man. They just don't care. 500-1500 line React function components are the norm. No standardized way for retrieving data from the back-end. I dread assignments that require me to modify or otherwise integrate with previously written code, because the best way I can come up with to figure out what the fuck is going on is to rewrite it sanely. I'm being a little hyperbolic, I do my best to avoid rewriting wherever possible, but I'm not mis-characterizing things by much. It's honestly depressing, especially considering I've had multiple other teams offer triple what I'm making right now, but neither of them were pre-seed startup SAAS companies which this one is, so here I stay for the time being. Invariably, I garner a reputation as "that guy" on any team I work on, although granted this is only the second multi-dev team I've ever worked on. Still though, it feels terrible to get a bad reputation for writing good code. Founder likes my work ethic and output though, so I guess I've got that going for me. Apologies if this turned into a bit of a rant, it just started pouring out, ha!

wilburTheDog 5y ago

>Stop being an asshole, and find non-assholes to work with. I think the process of realizing he needs to do that and doing it is what he's describing in his article. Generally people don't open up about how their behavior is toxic unless they recognize it as a problem. And, though my experience with Russian culture is limited, I understand that competitiveness and criticism is the rule, at least in the STEM fields there. So this guy has been behaving the same way (most) everyone else does, but now he's realizing it's bad and trying to fix himself. I don't think he deserves the criticism he's getting in the comments here. We all start somewhere, and trying to improve should always be encouraged.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
We are all products of our environment/the past. Things change when someone says "I don't like what I've become and I don't want to be this way anymore." Those folks often get undue criticism, especially if they choose to speak up in hopes of fostering positive change in others.

friedman23 5y ago

Same, I've never felt anything like this. I find code review tedious and the only thing I really care about is if their code is properly tested or not.

ravitation 5y ago

> I want to learn things, but code reviewing bad code doesn't teach me anything - I want to work with people who can teach me things when they review my code just as often as the reverse. I mean maybe you're working on extremely repetitive code, but the idea that you don't learn anything from reviewing bad code, and hopefully writing comments designed to help not humiliate, seems pretty bad to me also... You want to learn from others who review your code, but become angry when you have to teach those whose code you review? That seems bad...

majormajor 5y ago
It's certainly bad to get angry - I mentioned that there. I should clarify the anger happens when it's repeated more than on a one-off. E.g. if you have the same sloppy signs for 6 months (where I can tell by reading the code that you didn't even try to run your code locally), then I'm not learning anything and I'm getting frustrated because you're clearly not taking feedback to heart. I try to avoid letting this show, but it's frustrating.

dimal 5y ago

Yeah, I was afraid I'd see myself in this post, because I'm known for giving tough reviews. But I don't. I feel terrible whenever I give a tough review. I agonize about how to say the difficult things that need to be said but do it in a way that won't sting as much, and I know that often, it's going to sting anyway. I feel like I failed for not helping the other developer know how to do things better in the first place. I'm still figuring out how to make my process more constructive, but I've got a long way to go.

RangerScience 5y ago
One thing that I find that helps is, instead of saying that this thing is wrong, I just put in what would be right, and I do so with little commentary; usually `code block` -> `code block`. Another thing that I think helps, at the CR stage, is asking after their thoughts for putting the thing together the way that they did. This DOES run into the potential problem of showing that they didn't put thought into it (or that part of it), but.... ...there's a certain extent to which it's not your fault if they get to the CR and get a tough review. It's your organization's, "a month of work saves an hour of planning"-style. The developer who wrote the code getting the tough review wasn't set up to succeed, and IMHO that's more a comment on your org than any of the developers involved. To bring it back around to your personal process, my (unsolicited, haha) advice is that if you're finding yourself giving a tough review, switch to a 1:1 review / pair programming session. Async text communication is hard and prone to miscommunication.

atom_arranger 5y ago

Sometimes I’ll look over PRs early on, notice the entire approach is bad, and leave a comment. People often got annoyed, they would say their PR isn’t ready yet. That’s fair, I kind of understand, my intention was to just save them time going down an incorrect path though, because I know it’s going to be difficult to convince them later they need to rework days of work. Not sure what the solution is.

tharkun__ 5y ago
If team work isn't in the culture at your place it's very understandable they would react like that. If they don't see the benefits at your place and they've also only had bad experience with that at their previous places it's the natural defense mechanism. You could do the first step for example. Put up your own stuff for early on RFC. Invite them to work collaboratively on it with you and give early feedback and see how you react. Basically: be the role model and let them follow. Not guaranteed to work but it's one way to start some of it. Sidenote: most teams don't actually do team work. It's a bunch of people thrown together that work on more or less loosely related stuff but everyone is out for themselves. It's a matter of the environment they have to work in in most cases. Individual metrics driven productivity culture. You can't expect someone to do good team work and collaboratively come up with the best approach when their incentives from management's side is to get as many PRs merged as they can to get that bonus and a good end year rating etc.

aracena 5y ago

> I'm constantly looking for ways to do less tedious work, through automation and such, and code review for bad code is the worst sort of tedious work. What kind of automation or tools are you using for code review?

flud 5y ago

I concur. I'm not a coder but I do review things every 2 months as part of the release cycle, and whenever I see mistakes, especially silly mistakes, I don't feel smart at all, it doesn't even cross my mind. I feel, in order: disappointment - because how could they make this stupid mistake, then anger - why the f do I have to waste time to correct stupid mistakes, then a bit hateful - we need to fire this person and hire someone competent, then sometimes a bit scared - what else has this person got wrong and I missed, then a mix of all of the above. What would make me feel good, as far as reviews go, would be to say "hey, this person did this way better than I would have". Can you tell I hate doing reviews?