PR comments

Jan 24 19 Comments

I have a feature lead who has a lot of connections in the org and unfortunately I have to work with him. He made lots of baseless and useless comments on my PR just to show his leadership skills. The comments usually go like, move this bunch of code here and there. Not only that his comments aren’t precise enough. He writes one comment then another to add some more thoughts, then one more to add what he’s feeling right now and on and on, precisely each medium size PR(6-7 files) would have 20-30 comments.

On the contrary when I comment on his PR, he argued like “this is out of scope of this PR”, most of the time.

He goes to the leadership and says I have done a crappy job.

I don’t know how to fix it, seriously I am just so done with it! I keep on working over the weekends and late nights just to have this crap!

I am new to the org but I have more than 4 years of professional coding experience.

Sorry for venting here, but today I just lost it!

I want to work with someone else now :(

Edit: The other team members have a very clear thought process and communication skills. Their comments make a lot of sense. They don’t bombard PR with baseless comments. This guy finds some inner satisfaction to write comments just to do the things how he wants and not what is right for the product!
Other engineers don’t want to work with him, because of the above reasons! He only wants to shine!

TC: peanuts

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  • I feel for you OP. Had a senior engg like this on my team a while back. Would not sign off on any PR until every line looked exactly how he envisioned it.

    He even had review comments on unit tests I’d write ( no not that I missed a test case, more like moving a few lines here and there).

    Eventually I stopped trying to change his mind. Just did everything he asked for so I could go home! All those saying this is good productive feedback - you are killing the little joy and creativity and pride that engg had submitting the PR. There’s a way to give feedback.
    Jan 25 2
    • OP
      He’s not even a senior and there’s one level difference between us :(
      Jan 25
    • Maybe he’s been told to show more impact by doing reviews?

      If it’s just 1 level, and these comments are useless, maybe ask others to review it as well. If you’ve gotten a couple of sign offs and have addressed all meaningful comments, I’d mark the rest as won’t fix and merge.
      Jan 25
  • New
    K-2S0

    New

    K-2S0
    Let’s unpack that a little bit. Why do you think his comments are baseless and useless and what is your reaction to the comments, typically?
    Jan 24 4
    • OP
      Incorrect function name is suggested by him. I corrected the name myself.

      Nope that function is not used any where! Please see my edits.

      Also I am an experienced developer and have been a hard-worker. I don’t shy away learning from others, but today I just lost it.

      I can’t share more details about the comments as it would identify me, but they don’t make sense most 70% of the time.
      Jan 25
    • New
      Pbsm04

      New

      Pbsm04
      Saw your edits. If those aren’t just based on your perception but are direct comments made by other employees to you, then it’s time to talk to your manager about how to deal with him.
      Jan 25
  • Google / Eng
    LeeJaeDong

    Go to company page Google Eng

    PRE
    Amazon
     LeeJaeDong
    Are you sure you don’t work at Amazon?
    Jan 24 0
  • Square / Eng
    Itdp88

    Go to company page Square Eng

    PRE
    Google
     Itdp88
    Also, try to bring up coding style discussion in the larger team and ask people to agree on a common style guide. That way when you do things following the agreed upon style guide and get blocked by reviewers on you can just show them the style guide.
    Jan 25 0
  • Amazon
    happy19

    Go to company page Amazon

    happy19
    I once got a comment from someone about bad punctuation in a code comment; and this was a senior guy in the company for 7 years.. best is to not argue about the stupidity if it takes u a few min to address them; DO make it a point to call out the fact that they are nits.. something like fixing the nits in version 2 and will address all the other comments in version-3 etc..
    Jan 25 0