To be fair, we sometimes have to look through multiple related documentation and tickets to make sure the change was actually reviewed and approved by the necessary teams (network, security, etc.). We also have an SLA for PR reviews/approvals and some people have a habit of sending it out for approval at the last minute of the change window.
We decided that everyone in the team is allowed to approve changes. If no one has reviewed your change within 24 hours you are allowed to approve it yourself. It will usually come up in the daily sync that a self approval is imminent, which usually leads to someone taking a look.
Self-approval leads to a road of sadness. For example, a theoretical company needs to self-renew an ssl cert. No problem, the cert will be stored with the rest of the secrets and retrieved in a secure way on deployment. Unfortunately if you don’t store the cert key in a secure way, the deployment still works fine and you don’t need to figure out the “onerous” encryption process.
So you push the private key to the company git repo, and then deploy the cert! Done and Done.
We have well established ways to deal with secrets. Also, everyone is responsible enough to not self approve changes where they do things they are uncertain of.
If you don’t establish an encryption mechanism for secrets that allows for automatic, in memory decryption on deployment from the start of your project, then your project is run by incompetent developers/ops specialists/architects/management/etc. and deserves to fail.
Who said anything about only requiring 1 reviewer? And no, I did not drop an /s. You should try working for a healthy team where everyone takes collective responsibility and where the teams progress is more important than any one person’s progress.
I get the feeling you feel like I was somehow calling you out. I want to clarify the the intent of my message was more in the spirit of “wow must be nice” than “you’re making that up”. But also I’m just interested in how different your experience is from mine.
Who said anything about only requiring 1 reviewer?
I must have misunderstood. You said “If no one has reviewed your change within 24 hours you are allowed to approve it yourself.” To me, that sounds like, after 24 hours of no review, one self-approval is considered sufficient. That, in turn, seems to imply that before 24 hours, one non-self-approval is probably sufficient, no?
You should try working for a healthy team where everyone takes collective responsibility and where the teams progress is more important than any one person’s progress.
I’ve had team members in the past who are very self-focused, they tend to close a lot of tickets and look good, then get promoted out, leaving an unmaintainable mess behind. Allowing that is generally a failure of leadership. But right now, that’s not our problem, and what you describe is pretty much how we operate.
I’d love to work on a team where everybody took code review a lot more seriously, believe me, it’d be nice, but my team does generally get everything approved, with at least two non-self approvals, in under 24 hours. If something is getting ignored because people are busy and it’s a large change because we aren’t perfect, and there is some reason to get it in soon, it just takes a quick request on Slack to get the needed attention.
What I found surprising about your description was more that the potential of a self-approval coming up would, in itself, get people’s attention, rather than somebody reaching out personally and asking for a review.
Our big weakness is review quality, not quantity. It’s crazy the number of times I look at something and see the two or three approvals already, start going through it, and find issue after issue. I see that on other teams as well, where there’s usually only one or two devs who ever really make any comments on a review, it seems to be very common.
I wish they were auto-generated. The most senior engineer, clever as he is, has a thing for re-architecturing things and doing “refactors” and “tidies” at the same time.
I’ve voiced my concerns and at least the big re-architecturing sometimes get broken into child-jiras, but it doesn’t always help.
Then theres the merge conflicts on my branches i have to resolve. AHHH
Whose fault is it though? I get that collective will is hard, but you as an individual have the power to move, organize, mobilize, whatever you want.
The company doesn’t value you? Move. Why are you giving this company free labor?
For the “prestige” of being a (“anonymous”) reddit mod? Give me a break. There’s better things to do and be prouder of in life.
Stop giving this company time, money, and attention. And tell others to do the same. Otherwise, you’re digging your own (and everyone else’s) hole.
Yes, it’s unfair, but it’s an unfair system. So let’s all do our part. And let’s also organize and mobilize on that. Can’t be done by continuing to feed it.
Absolutely. I quit Facebook about a dozen years ago, Reddit was there to take its’ place.
Then my final visit to Reddit was on June 11th I think it was, the moment the first protest started I quit Apollo for the very last time.
Somewhere around this time, probably earlier, I did the same with Twitter.
This time, it was Kbin/Lemmy that were there, the only viable options, still tiny and awkward, the sudden influx still only a fraction of what Reddit has, yet it flooded the system like a bucket of water falling on top of a fly.
And yet here I am, and so are you, and many others. The variety and portions of content are still much smaller than Reddit, but this place has something that Reddit also had: a quality community, apparent from these discussions, or go look at the art in ArtPorn or TrafitionalArt, or sure, absolutely why not - the shitpostings.
This place pushes that intellectual button for me. And now I also give myself time to do the NYT Crossword and watch physics/cosmology videos on YouTube.
I think a lot of them just want whatever community or information hub their sub represents to exist at all, but they know their userbase isn’t actually committed enough to migrate to another site against the grain of network effects.
Dunno. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind that people give spez free labor because he actually has the leverage for it, for now, and the unfairness of that isn’t their highest priority. What I’d like to see is better tools to help users have an easier time using more than one site/network at once, so the prospect of contributing to something other than Reddit is less daunting for typical users. I’m on Reddit, Lemmy, and some other sites, but I don’t really expect most people to be comfortable building a routine of checking a bunch of different sites regularly, or switching entirely to a site without the amount/quality of stuff they want just out of spite or altruism.
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.
Listen, if I walk into a restaurant, and there’s a table with nine, there’s nine people in the restaurant, and they’re… the people, there’s nine people and they’re… nine of them are Nazis, and I sit at the table, then I’m one of the nine. There’s a ten Nazi table in the restaurant. In every restaurant.
I had a Dale Earnhardt Bic lighter in 1998. That’s about as much as I know other than that he suffered an untimely early demise and was well loved by fans.
Reddit moderators sold their souls for garbage and deserve it. The super mods there serve capitalism for free and deserve all the shit that falls from it.
I advocated for forcing state representatives to stand and face a crowd of their voters in r/worldnews and was banned for inciting violence. It’s literally the founding block of American Democracy that our government serves us and should be overthrown when it no longer serves the people, and people were responding positively to the message.
They banned me from the sub and escalated it to the Admins to get me temp site banned.
All because I said representatives should be forced to stand in front of the people they represent regularly.
I hope the CEO continues to grind them till they break.
Why would worldnews host that anyway? It is a US politics concern, which is explicitly outside the topic of worldnews.
And based on my time as a moderator, users who run off to other forums to complain about mod decisions usually leave out important details. Not saying that is necessarily the case for you, but I am not just going to take your word for it.
And violent overthrow is not a “founding block of American Democracy”. Right after he won the Revolutionary War, George Washington used the Army to put down an American revolution against taxes:
I didn’t call to violently overthrow a government, and the irony in the time frame of Washington’s life you decided was important to this conversation.
It is convenient that you only wanted to talk about Washington after the Revolutionary War.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
From the Declaration of Independence itself, the founding principles of the Independence of the USA.
You might not know this, but American state representatives play a part in world politics and there are articles hosted on r/worldnews that are about them.
Me: “So, I completed this time critical task a week ago, had it QA tested, and it’s been awaiting approval since Tuesday. I’ve posted my PR with links in the dev chat, I’ve pinged each of you individually each day as well. It is still awaiting approval before I can merge and pick up a new card from our backlog that is dependent on these changes. If literally anyone has the bandwidth to do this review, please do. I’ll post the link here again as well, to make this super convenient for you all, as well as the Jira card for reference, and the changes and requirements themselves are extremely straight forward. It should only take 5-10 minutes, tops. And I will be sitting here useless until it is done. Somebody, please, for the love of god…”
My team: crickets
Scrum Master: “Thanks for the update, kryptonianCodeMonkey… next up is…”
“manager, person_a and person_b are the reviewers on my time sensitive PR. I’m blocked. You are aware of everyone’s priorities, can you indicate prioritization of tasks and delegate how we should act?”
Every time I see these comments, I wonder if I was just lucky with my scrum masters and most actually suck, or if it’s confirmation bias. We don’t have a scrum master where I work, but my whole job as lead is keeping things rolling, and this would be just unacceptable.
My Scrum Master is nice, but her role seems to mostly revolve around enforcing documentation standards, coordinating refinements and retrospectives, tracking metrics on task completion, and maintaining our Jira board. She doesn’t have a lot of involvement with the specifics of development, delegation, or how we execute our tasks.
Yeah, I also wonder what kind of shitty culture they have in these teams? I mean, who would leave a coworker hanging like that? That’s just a collective dick move.
We have big red magnets representing blocked to put on the board. We have to speak about every single blocker every stand up and what the team’s path forward is to unblock the thing. If it’s waiting for vendor, then that’s all we can do. If the ball is in our court for any blockers, and its still there tomorrow without a really good reason, there is hell to pay.
Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows
When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors
He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.
It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.
I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better
My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so
Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity
I mean you’ve done your job and even reminded them everyday that they need to do theirs for you to do yours. Take screenshots and if they try to sack you, straight to court
lemmy.ml
Newest