>When code reviews were in person, as a senior person, I could deliver feedback without that feedback becoming a public albatross stuck around someone's neck. W

>When code reviews were in person, as a senior person, I could deliver feedback without that feedback becoming a public albatross stuck around someone's neck. We all screw up and miss things. Sometimes we don't write the best code. Sometimes we don't know something that should be universal knowledge. Heh, I actually ran into a funny situation because of permanence of code review. One time I was onboarding a new employee (call him Bob) to how pull requests worked in GitHub, and I wrote up a sample one from his computer. Just to be silly, and because I didn't realize the implications, I said "okay and you fill out the body, describing what you did. As an example, let me just put in some filler text, 'hey, you people suck'."[1] I was planning to delete the obvious-garbage PR, but I didn't realize ... GitHub doesn't let you delete PRs, only close them! And it triggers emails! Mercifully, no one said anything. But then months later, another co-worker (call him Charlie) was venting to me about what he didn't like about Bob: "And, another thing, one time, that asshole wrote up this pull request, where he said, hey, you people suck!" So I owned up: "Oh, uh, Charlie, that ... was actually me. I was writing a dummy pull request to onboard Bob but sent it by accident." Then Charlie said, "Well ... he's still an asshole!" [1] I think I wasn't planning to submit it at all, but after a while Bob probably wanted to see it in action and I forgot to remove that part. (And yes, I also now make sure to use more innocuous filler text.)