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Comment by fg137

2 days ago

> most PR feedback was stylistic, with the occasional bug identified.

I think that only speaks for your own experience. I have definitely seen more than a few PRs that needed significant work.

Yeah, that's fair. I have spent most of my career on high-pressure teams within FAANG, where we aggressively managed-out anyone who wasn't making the grade. And now in the startup world, we apply a very aggressive hiring bar.

I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy working on teams who were routinely producing PRs that were in bad shape.

  • This is such a weird take. From my 5 years at Amazon, the only people I saw "managed out" were engineers who were good, it even great, at the code part of their job, but trash at working with the team. Our hiring bar was notoriously high, and it wasn't uncommon for engineers who were leads at their startup to get hired at L5.

    When I was Bar Raising for promotions, I didn't review their PRs, I reviewed their Reviews. I reviewed the PRs that mentioned those reviews to see what slipped by. I looked at non-crunch time to verify they were reviewing at least as much code as their teammates.

    If I saw someone 4x-ing the amount of code, they had better be 4x-ing the reviews too... if all they were leaving was stylistic formatting comments, they'd never make it to L6, unless the only thing they were reviewing was L6 code.