Comment by lelanthran
17 hours ago
I wonder where the reviewer worked where PRs are addressed in 5 hours. IME it's measured in units of days, not hours.
I agree with him anyway: if every dev felt comfortable hitting a stop button to fix a bug then reviewing might not be needed.
The reality is that any individual dev will get dinged for not meeting a release objective.
I worked in a company where reviews took days. The CTO complained a lot about the speed, but we had decent code quality.
Now I work at a company where reviews take minutes. We have 5 lines of technical debt per 3 lines of code written. We spend months to work on complicated bugs that have made it to production.
My last FAANG team had a soft 4-hour review SLA, but if it was a complicated change then that might just mean someone acknowledging it and committing to reviewing it by a certain date/time. IIRC, if someone requested a review and you hadn't gotten to it by around the 3-hour mark you'd get an automated chat message "so-and-so has been waiting a while for your review".
Everyone was very highly paid, managers measured everything (including code review turnaround), and they frequently fired bottom performers. So, tradeoffs.
That sounds horrible. I don't know how people stand to work in those conditions.
Well, there's a reason I'm no longer working there :)
But some people will put up with a lot for half a million dollars a year.
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Why does it sound horrible to have your code reviewed quickly? There is no reason for reviews to wait a long time. 4 hours is already a long time, it means you can wait to do it right before you go home or after lunch.
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Sounds kind of amazing to me. 4 hours is a bit ridiculous, but I wish we had some kind of automated system to poke people about reviews so I don't have to. It's doubly bad because a) I have to do it, and b) it makes me look annoying.
My ideal system (for work) would be something like: after 2 days, ask for a review if the reviewer hasn't given it. After a week, warn them the PR will be auto-approved. After 2 weeks, auto-approve it.
> days, not hours
At some moment I realized that reviews are holding things back most of all. I started to jump to review my team's code ASAP. I started to encourage others to go review things ASAP. It works even in relatively large companies, as long as your team has a reasonable size.
This can be learned, taught, and instilled.
At the bottom of the page it says he is CEO of Tailscale.
I'm yet to see a project where reviews are handled seriously. Both business and developers couldn't care less.
I worked somewhere that actually had a great way to deal with this. It only works in small teams though.
We had a "support rota", i.e. one day a week you'd be essentially excused from doing product delivery.
Instead, you were the dev to deal with big triage, any code reviews, questions about the product, etc.
Any spare time was spent looking for bugs in the backlog to further investigate / squash.
Then when you were done with your support day you were back to sprint work.
This meant there was no ambiguity of who to ask for code review, and limited / eliminated siloing of skills since everyone had to be able to review anyone else's work.
That obviously doesn't scale to large teams, but it worked wonders for a small team.
I have, and in each sprint we always had tickets for reviewing the implementation, which could take anywhere from an hour to 2 days.
The code quality was much better than in my current workplace where the reviews are done in minutes, although the software was also orders of magnitude more complex.
Bonus points: reviews are not taken seriously in the legitimate sense, but a facade of seriousness consisting of picky complaints is put forth to reinforce hierarchy and gatekeeping
I’ve worked on teams like you describe and it’s been terrible. My current team’s SDLC is more along the 5-hour line - if someone hasn’t reviewed your code by the end of today, you bring it up in standup and have someone commit to doing it.