Yup, exactly. I used to do third-party reviews at Google and people pretty much always ran the presubmit tests and the upgrade CLs had the dependent changes an

Yup, exactly. I used to do third-party reviews at Google and people pretty much always ran the presubmit tests and the upgrade CLs had the dependent changes and approvals from those owners. I never encountered any breakage dramas (only people mad that they couldn't add a new programming language to google3); people were generally excellent citizens even though there was no "be an excellent citizen to get promoted" carrot around. (Hell, I did the third-party reviews out of the goodness of my heart, and I doubt any promo committee ever said "hey, we hate jrockway's project work and peer feedback, but he did rubber stamp that upgrade to foobarbaz so let's promote him".) Things have probably changed since I left, but I bet the author's experience is pretty rare these days too. Google's system works quite well for their scale.