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Comment by rhetocj23

7 days ago

One thing I don’t get - If you spend much of your time reviewing, you’re just reading - you’re not actually doing anything - you’re passive in the activity of code production. By extension you will become worse at knowing what a good standard of code is and become worse at reviewing code.

I’m not a SWE so I have no interests to protect by criticising what is going on.

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rhetocj23

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llamatastic  6 days ago

In my DJing years I've learned that it is best to provide a hot signal and trim the volume than trying to amplify it later, because you end up amplifying noise. Max out the mixer volume and put a compressor (and a limiter after to protect the speaker set up - it will make it sound awful if hit, but it won't damage your set up and it will flag clueless bozos loud and clear) later, don't try to raise it after it leaves the origin.

It seems to me that adding noise to the process and trying to cut it out later is a self defeating proposition. Or as Deming put it, (paraphrasing) you can't QC quality into a bad process.

I can see how it seems better to "move fast and break things" but I will live and die by the opposite "move slow and fix things". There's much, much more to life than maximizing short term returns over a one dimensional naïve utilitarian take on value.

executesorder66  6 days ago

Tell that to Linus Torvalds.

His whole job is just doing code review, and I'd argue he's better at coding now than he ever was before.

  • benterix  6 days ago

    I'd be careful with extrapolating based on the creator of Linux and Git. His life and activities are not in line with those of more typical programmers.

    • executesorder66  6 days ago

      > His life and activities are not in line with those of more typical programmers.

      Okay sure.

      I'll use myself as another example then. When I was a dev I used to write a lot of code. Now I'm a tech team lead, and I write less code, but review significantly more code than I used to previously.

      I feel more confident, comfortable, and competent in my coding abilities now than ever before even though I'm coding less.

      I feel like this is because I am exposed to a lot more code, and not in a passive way (reading legacy code) but an active way (making sure a patch set will correctly implement feature X, without breaking anything existing)

      I feel like this principal applies to any programmer. Same thing with e.g. writers. Good writers read _a lot_ and it makes them better writers.

      This is my opinion and not based on any kind of research. So if you disagree, that's fine with me. But so far I haven't seen anything to convince me of the opposite.

  • walleeee  6 days ago

    It's not only that Linus is atypical, it's also that he is reviewing other people's code, and those people are also highly competent, or they would not be kernel committers. And they all share large amounts of high-quality and hard-earned implicit context.

    Reviewing well executed changesets by skilled developers on complicated and deliberate projects is not comparable to "fleet of agents" vibe engineering. One of these tasks will sharpen you regardless how lazily you approach it. The other requires extreme discipline to avoid atrophy.