I have a teammate who I feel does excessive code reviews. He finds the smallest details to request changes on. I wouldn’t mind if it’s just a few things here and there but when I send it back for review he finds another tiny thing to request changes on. It basically turns a good working solution into an over optimized solution and delays launch by at least a week and sometimes longer. Even when I push back or when other teammates or the manager approves the code he still insists his changes have to be implemented. It can get very irritating not to mention discouraging. I don’t really want to use up even more time to do the same thing back to him. How would you handle this situation?
This is the responsibility of your manager. If timelines are sliding because of nitpicks, ask your manager to handle it and to guide reviewers into not nitpicking.
Happens often to newer engineers. If he’s making good points you have to learn his style and try and improve your code
When it’s good points I don’t mind and i incorporate. When it’s nitpicking it becomes irritating. When I nitpick I always leave it as optional and never enforce it.
In my experience it’s usually the newer engineers making the nit picks, regardless of level even.
He will still review it regardless. No he is pretty good but the changes he sometimes asks for are not necessarily and they cause a clash between releasing good solutions on time vs overengineering and releasing a week+ late.
Just dont add him as reviewer. I am sure you have other team mates. Every team seems to have such a guy
He will still review it regardless
Can’t. If he requests the changes it’s red flagged until they get made or addressed. It won’t merged otherwise
Treat review as non mandatory changes. Just tell him that you’ll not do some of proposed changes and merge when you have an approval from other team member and you think the code is good enough.
If he requests changes I can’t merge
Then talk to your manager about review policies. Or you may raise that question during sprint retrospective. State that reviews are considerably delayed by nitpicking and ask if the rest of the team is OK with that. If it’s not just you who have trouble with that team member others will vote for changing review policies. May be introduce optional changes, no merge hard blocking when someone comments on review or may be just ask that teammate publicly to be leas strict with the code.
how long are you in the job? what is you YOE? what about the reviewer?
3.5. Same more or less for him
Challenge him for a duel 🤺
Why not mention that this change doesn't affect the functionality, and so would be incorporated in a separate pr ? And push that to technical backlog kind of section ?
Can you create a separate ticket for "optimize the as-is solution" and put it on the backlog. If the optimizations are really important, they'll get picked up otherwise they'll get ignored and not your problem.
Lgtm