I haven’t done any serious programming in a long time. Is this mostly about corporate process and hierarchies for programming or does this apply to open source projects as well?
Seems really demoralizing putting in the work to add something to an open source project and having it waste away unreviewed and unappreciated.
It’s more about scale. Small open source projects might get one PR a month. Your average tech company is dealing with dozens of PR every single day. Review fatigue is real in these environments
As a senior at my last big company job, basically all I did was conduct meetings and do PRs. It’s such a grind.
My opinion now is that most PR is worthless anyway. Most people give, at best, a superficial skim for typos, lack of comments, or other low-hanging replies (that usually, really, a static checker or linter should be dealing with).
Reading the code base in little chunks like that doesn’t give you proper context for the changes you’re reading. Automated unit and integration tests would be better for catching issues like that, but of course then who is reviewing and verifying the tests? Who’s writing them for that matter?
Ideally, pair-programming or having extra people on projects to create knowledge redundancy would help. But companies want to replace juniors with AI now, so that’s not looking good. Senior devs and architects might know the major pieces of much of the code, but can they “load it into working memory” sufficiently to do a quality PR that will catch something the tests didn’t and QA wouldn’t? Not in my experience.
I think the best actually-implementable solution for most teams is to get rid of PR expectations and take a multi-pronged approach to replacing that process.
use tooling to check for and fix basic stuff. Use a linter, adopt a code standard, get a code formatting tool that forced adherence to the standard and run it on every PR.
Unit tests if you got them, start if you don’t. You don’t need 90% code coverage, just make sure critical paths are covered.
Turn one of your useless meetings into a code review session. Each week/sprint, one Very Important Code section is presented by the developer that works on it most or that last changed it. This helps the whole team learn the code base, gets more eyes on the important stuff regularly, and enforces not just a consistent style but a consistent approach to solving and documenting problems.
PR (and the github PR approval stuff or its equivalent for you) should be streamlined but preserved. Do have a second person approve changes before merging, just to double check that tests have finished and passed and all that. If your team is so busy that no one ever approves PRs then allow self-approval and be done with it. This will make regular code review very important for security and stability, since any dev could be misbehaving unseen, but these are the trade-offs you make when burning out your team is more important than quality.
I caught a junior trying to reimplement an existing feature, poorly, in a way that would have affected every other consumer of the software I’m a code owner on a week or two ago. There’s good reason to keep them around.
PRs suck to do, but having a rotating team of owners helps, and linting + auto formatting helps with a lot of the ticky tacky stuff.
Honestly, the worst part is “newGuy has requested your review on a PR you requested changes on but he hasn’t addressed” that’ll get you in the ignored pile real quick.
I generally agree and like this strategy, but to add to the other comment about catching reimplemented code, there’s just some code quality reviewing that cannot be done by automating tooling right now.
Some scenarios come to mind:
code is written in a brittle fashion, especially with external data, where it’s difficult to unit test every type of input; generally you might catch improper assumptions about the data in the code
code reimplements a more battle tested functionality, or uses a library no longer maintained or is possibly unreliable
code that the test coverage unintentionally misses due to code being located outside of the test path
poor abstractions, shallow interfaces
It’s hard to catch these without understanding context, so I agree a code review meets are helpful and establishing domain owners. But I think you still need PR reviews to document these potential problems
these are the trade-offs you make when burning out your team is more important than quality.
Yep.
Many directors and CIOs know exactly where they stand regardingthe classic value proposition: deliver something trivial before next quarterly earnings statements - at the low easy cost of losing all organizational understanding of the code base.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment here, the world is fucked and unchecked crony capitalism is the problem. The rich get richer and the rest of us barely get by. Also fuck Huffman for ruining the only social media platform I’d used consistently for over a decade.
That said, Huffman’s salary is not even close to the number reported here. He makes something like $350k in a year (still a wildly high salary, no one person needs to make that much in a single year!), this “compensation” is closely tied to his equity in Reddit and it’s predicted value when the company goes public.
Most CEOs are compensated in this way and I think it’s not exactly a bad way to do it (partially for employees but mostly for investors). This value is tied to performance, so if the CEO does stupid shit and ruins the company, it directly affects his compensation. This can be a good thing if that CEO makes good business decisions, which can lead to more jobs and more stability for the workers. I realize this is not always the case, but that’s the general idea.
It still sucks, and I still think no individual should make more money than is needed to live comfortably, but it’s not like he’s raking in 193 million every year like it seems from this tweet.
350k a year sounds about right for an experienced software engineer at a large tech-related company. That being said I don’t think Huffman, as a CEO, even actually does any engineering…
This is why I finally left, because the asshole started removing his volunteer moderators and replacing them with employees for the crime of protesting his lies and slander of app developers who brought in hundreds of thousands of users, many of whom are now reading this comment because they’re no longer on that sinking ship of a site.
Him living rent free in his head is living rent free in your head broski. fuck that, you should pay him rent for his living rent free experience living in your head
Oh my god you’re right, this is all I do. I have no job, no home, no friends, no family, nothing but this account and this app and my anger towards one person I’ve never met. Right.
You spent all this time writing this because his comment is living rent free in your head lmao. At least he is raging against a billionaire, you’re raging against a lemmy comment lmao
Yup, same. RIF app was how I loved browsing reddit, and it shutting down over the API cost was devastating. Add in the forced removal of mods who didn’t re-open their communities that were protesting was the final nail in the coffin for me. Fuck their IPO.
Such a scam website - all the content is provided and moderated for free, the CEO steals anything resembling profit, the investors are all left with empty pockets. Fuck spez and anyone still using that site.
They were fairly upfront about banning people who they suspected were male or who were in subs they didn’t approve of though. It was totally toxic and completely inappropriate.
The whole concept of inceldom is inherently hateful in my opinion. It is founded on the belief that anyone is owed sex and romantic partnerships, and that external circumstances are denying them their natural right to fuck. We are (generally speaking) wired to seek viable mates, with natural preferences for desirable traits. That not everyone is successful is just part of the selection process.
Essentially it is a whole ideology of denying responsibility for their own inadequacies and blaming them on the object of their desires.
Mods are paid in power and the ability to push their opinions.
A not-insignificant number of them are paid in wages and the ability to push the opinions of their employers. Can’t find it, but there was some well-researched accounts of several of the bigger subs being moderated by think tank / party owned accounts, based on IP-tracking and associated account activity.
Most famously, there was the takeover of the /r/Libertarian server by right-wing agitators back in 2018.
That’s not even getting into the direct (and indirect) advertising that site admins manage on behalf of the company itself, which is functionally a form of moderation.
Most big subs have some kind of professional staff at this point, if for no other reason than inattentive or rebellious moderators have been purged by Reddit admin. You’re not going to find some weekend warrior at the top of /r/pics or /r/news or /r/politics.
I was a mod of a decent sized sub until an admin came in and…somehow…convinced the top mod to make the admin top mod. Left a bad taste in my mouth for sure.
what is that supposed to mean? when the api charges were announced, multiple subs went private and were resurrected against the mods’ free will. other mods were instituted. whether any of those made any money, i don’t know. keep in mind that i was not one of those mods and thus cannot verify that information, it is just what was posted on reddit multiple times. trying to deescalate and moderate a sub is a good thing and we should be grateful to those who actively do, but holding it against them that they do not take any money for that neither makes sense nor does anyone benefit from it.
I was just saying they do it for non monetary reasons, and if there is a continuous supply of people willing to do it for free, they really shouldnt pay.
Yea idk why you have downvotes you’re literally just describing capitalism. Has no one seen others volunteering for positions when other people get paid to do the same thing?
Numbers like this are always bonkers to me. Like, how have we allowed this to happen?
It’s a fucking social media site. I know surgeons who work 80-100 hour weeks and make 1.5M a year—and even that seems obscene to me. But they’re academic subspecialty surgeons who are quite literally saving lives daily by personally performing heart transplants. How the fuck do we think as a society that a smug ass CEO’s “effort” is worth 200x that?
Most people are too invested and emotionally attached (not saying it is a bad thing) to rise up and do some actual damage, because they’d be throwing their lives out, so not really gaining anything in the end. We need some good ol revolution.
lemmy.ml
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