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Comment by titanomachy

13 hours ago

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.

  • 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.

    • Why would I care if my code is reviewed quickly? If the answer is some variant of "I get punished if I don't have enough changes merged in fast enough," that's not helping. From the other side, it's having someone constantly breathe down your neck. Hope you don't get in a flow at the wrong time and need to break it so Mr. Lumbergh doesn't hit you up on Teams. It just reeks of a culture of "unlimited pto," rigid schedules, KPI hacking, and burnout.

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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.