Comment by teeray
8 hours ago
Code reviews are a volunteer’s dilemma. Nobody is showered with accolades by putting “reviewed a bunch of PRs” on their performance review by comparison with “shipped a bunch of features.” The two go hand-in-hand, but rewards follow marks of authorship despite how much reviewers influence what actually landed in production.
Consequently, people tend to become invested in reviewing work only once it’s blocking their work. Usually, that’s work that they need to do in the future that depends on your changes. However, that can also be work they’re doing concurrently that now has a bunch of merge conflicts because your change landed first. The latter reviewers, unfortunately, won’t have an opinion until it’s too late.
Fortunately, code is fairly malleable. These “reviewers” can submit their own changes. If your process has a bias towards merging sooner, you may merge suboptimal changes. However, it will converge on a better solution more quickly than if your changes live in a vacuum for months on a feature branch passing through the gauntlet of a Byzantine review and CI process.
Or the reviewer feels responsible for the output of the code from the person they are reviewing or the code they are modifying. For instance a lead on the team gets credit for the output of the team Also, wanting to catch bugs on review before they make your on call painful can be a large motivation.
I've always encouraged everyone more junior to review everything regardless of who signs off, and even if you don't understand what's going on/why something was done in a particular way, to not be shy to leave comments asking for clarification. Reviewing others' work is a fantastic way to learn. At a lower level, do it selfishly.
If you're aiming for a higher level, you also need to review work. If you're leading a team or above (or want to be), I assume you'll be doing a lot of reviewing of code, design docs, etc. If you're judged on the effectiveness of the team, reviews are maybe not an explicit part of some ladder doc, but they're going to be part of boosting that effectiveness.
It’s weird that the two tasks that most programmers would agree are most important (reviewing code and deleting code) are not heavily rewarded.
Unfortunately for programmers, programmers aren’t doing the rewarding