Handling code reviews
I'm coming from a background where I was lucky enough to work with some awesome engineers worldwide. I have learned quite a lot from these people and I always try to share this information with other engineers when I review their code. I have been recently facing quite a few engineers in this company who gets way too defensive with their code just because they don't want to spend time implementing the changes. Sometimes I feel like shutting the laptop and not working for some time after reading their responses. Unfortunately, I can't ignore this also as my role demands me to review my peer's code. I guess I'm almost reaching the pinnacle of what I can bear by reaching out here and I'm literally lost on how to handle this now. I can't switch my company also now due to some immigration stuff. Please give me some advice on how to tackle this if you have been in my shoes. YOE: 4.5 TC: 190k #zoominfo #techcareer #codereview #techlead
Don’t stress mate. You do your part and ask the manager whether your request for change can block other’s changes . Do whatever the manager is willing to support you for
Start driving your teams coding best practice and get by in from others. When you have flushed out some common best practices and coding guidelines, document them and then just reference those during the code review, less personal that way. Then just try automating any rules that you can and allow your CI to fail the commit if it's not passing. For the most part if it's style and formatting and not automated, make it a nit but don't block on it if you care about it automate to not waste people's time and to remove personal preference comments. If you have coding practices for unit and integration testing, document that and reference it. If it's something architectural that will make system fragile or bug prone comment and request changes. Otherwise smaller things such as "I prefer you to do it my way" without any strong reasoning usually aren't helpful and shouldn't be blocking.
Good suggestions! We tried to putting some code guidelines in place initially unfortunately we have many scrum teams working on the same product and not all teams follow these. Some teams just rush into delivering the features without any mind for code quality due to pressure from top.
If these "guidelines" are things that can be automated and your teams not investing in the effort to do that then probably not worth arguing in code diff bc it's more of a preference thing. If it's more architectural your team should push back on incorrect usage of your areas of ownership.
A big part of this is team/company culture. Are you a TL or in some leadership role? If not you may need your manager/TL to be onboard. If they don't care, then don't bother; chill and wait till you can switch jobs.
People might feel vulnerable when criticized. I was feeling salty after my first pr comments lol. Talk to them on 1-1 and explain that its not criticism of their ability, its for common goal
Yes, 1-1 has been effective sometimes. I prefer this sometimes once I feel like the conversation is going way beyond it’s supposed to be on the PR. And I totally feel you with the initial days, I still get comments on my PR sometimes. But I think I have learned by now to take it in a constructive way without any ego coming into the picture.
Exactly, i learned to take the ego out.
Give an example please
I can definitely give a few examples but that's not the point here. If you are trying to judge if I'm just being fussy/just PITA then trust me I do let go of nit-pick comments easily. I do stress a bit on code quality though. I'm just trying to reach out here to get some useful feedback from those who have been in my shoes if you understand what I'm trying to say.