Comment by causalscience
11 days ago
Yeah or worse like my boss. We don't have a style guide. But he always wants style changes in every PR, and those style changes are some times contradictory across different PRs.
Eventually I've told him "if your comment does not affect performance or business logic, I'm ignoring it". He finally got the message. The fact that he accepted this tells me that deep down he knew his comments were just bike shedding.
I've been in teams like this - people who are lower on the chain of power get run in circles as they change to appease one, then change to appease another then change to go back to appease the first again.
Then, going through their code, they make excuses about their code not meeting the same standards they demand.
As the other responder recommends, a style guide is ideal, you can even create an unofficial one and point to it when conflicting style requests are made
> Then, going through their code, they make excuses about their code not meeting the same standards they demand.
Yes!! Exactly. When it comes to my PRs, he once made this snarky comment about him having high expectations in terms of code quality. When it comes to his PRs, he does the things he tells me not to do. In fact, I once sent him a "dis u?" with a link to his own code, as a response to something he told me I shouldn't do. To his credit he didn't make excuses, he responded "I could've done better there, agreed".
In general he's not bad, but his nitpicking is bad. I don't really understand what's going on in his mind that drives this behavior, it's weird.
You should have a style guide, or adopt one. Having uniform code is incredibly valuable as it greatly reduces the cognitive load of reading it. Same reason that Go's verbose "err != nil" works so well.
Style guidelines should be enforced automatically. Leaving that for humans to verify is a recipe for conflict and frustration.
Ideally yes, but there's plenty of cases where that's not desirable or possible.
For example, most people would agree you should use exhaustive checks when possible(matching in rust, records in typescript, etc.). But how do you enforce that? Ban other types of control flow? But even if you find a good balanced way to enforce it, you won't always want to enforce it. There's plenty of good use cases where you explicitly don't want a check to be exhaustive. At which point now you gotta make sure there's an escape mechanism to whatever crackhead check you've setup. Better to just leave a comment with a link to your style guide explaining why this is done. Many experienced developers that are new to rust or typescript simply never think of things like this, so it's worthwhile to document it.