PR process killing morale and productivity

https://blackentropy.com/your-pr-process-is-killing-morale-and-productivity/

145 216 2 years ago

Per the article, not the pull requests itself, but the tedious bikeshedding around them. The article's headline is a bit misleading.

rob74• 2 years ago

That's probably what they mean by "PR Process"?

WesolyKubeczek2• 2 years ago

"Your" got editorialized away and the title became quite categorical. Implying all of them kill morale and are flawed.

DragonStrength• 2 years ago

Watched a guy get fired mostly because he made code review such a nightmare for everyone else while getting lapped by everyone in terms of actual output. I’m not sure there’s much to be done once you’ve hit “toxic.” The only question is whether the standard can be reset for the whole team.

treespace8• 2 years ago

GIT seams to be optimized for network of trust. With one person at the top approving what gets merged into the release.

This person of course does not do all of the verification, other then broad strokes of what the change does, and who wrote it, reviewed it and tested it.

I feel like companies do not want a large tree like structure for their development teams.

Without a network of trust it can become mob rule, which is what this article appears to be describing.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 2 years ago

That makes sense; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law applies and git was created by Linus Torvalds for Linux, which works exactly like that.

barbazoo6• 2 years ago

I’ve recently come across a discussion where a new developer joined a team and faced over 300 PR comments on their first contribution. Most of it was stylistic nitpicking. This isn’t just unproductive, it’s outright toxic.

For me this says more about the company culture than any inherent flaws with the code review process.

znpy3• 2 years ago

on a different side: it also tell you (a lot) about specific people.

I've seen good/great people call out the nitpicks (in my case it was often mis-spelling, due to not being a native speaker of english) but will approve the PR anyway (implicitly expecting another revision to be sent, trusting the submitter).

On the other hand bad/toxic people will drown you with stylistic nitpicks and won't approve (and trust) you to do your best work. You will be essentially blocked pending their approval (so that nitpicks are changed according to their likings).

The weird thing is that all this traceability leaves traces for management to see who's doing a good pr review job and who's not... But I've learned that management usually does not care much.

prh82• 2 years ago

"will approve after nitpicks" is the most asinine behavior

barbazoo6• 2 years ago

Agree. Why did the junior developer feel like their changes were ready to be reviewed. Looks like they had little guidance. Why didn't a senior developer suggest to close the PR, apply the formatting or whatever and then re-open the PR or something like that. 300 comments, that's either a lot of developers commenting or just a lot of back and forth. I don't get how anyone would let it come to that point. Makes me feel grateful for the places I worked at and the experience I have now.

dec0dedab0de• 2 years ago

* I've seen good/great people call out the nitpicks (in my case it was often mis-spelling, due to not being a native speaker of english) but will approve the PR anyway (implicitly expecting another revision to be sent, trusting the submitter).*

I always thought this was the best way.

I wish these systems had a way to assign severity to comments, and urgency to the commit.

If you have a jr developer it is your job to give them stylistic feedback, the problem comes from mixing it in with security holes or sneaky bugs. And when the process doesn’t identify when we need to ship it yesterday, vs in the next few months.

to11mtm2• 2 years ago

It's tough with spelling sometimes.

In my current role I review a lot of PRs, they tend to be large due to the waterfall way things work... If I don't ask to fix the spelling now, It might not happen for a year or two. That said if it can be fixed in separate PR before release, that's fine.

Really, it's best to have some terms or explicitness.

For example, with my teams 'Nitpick' means I'm just being nitpicky, Doesn't have to change unless it's on the edge (and I'm explicit as to why it should change, i.e. I know the next thing will need the change anyway). "Consider" means It doesn't have to happen, but here's some food for thought. "PLZ FIX" is fairly self explanatory.

Also, making sure management (especially for contract houses) knows that PRs are a 'judgement free zone' and should not be held against people for perf reviews etc; that should be collected by other peer feedback channels instead.

rileymat23• 2 years ago

In many dynamic languages, depending on scope, spelling is not a nitpick, it has long term mental costs and very well can cause bugs.

bluefirebrand5• 2 years ago

Honestly for me it tells me they need to hook up a code auto formatter into their workflow

Forget stylistic nitpicking. Enforce a code quality standard with a linter and formatter and be done with it

DanHulton• 2 years ago

This literally what the article says.

barbazoo6• 2 years ago

Oh 100%. Discussing style within a PR unrelated to changing the styling rules seems like a waste of time.

InvaderFizz• 2 years ago

I agree. Even within my own org there is some nitpicking, but it's almost always about style consistency for our shared codebase, which is valid.

If your PR doesn't pass lint checks, it doesn't get merged. And the only reason it would fail the lint checks is if your pre-commit hooks didn't fire.

There is no argument of 2,4,8 space vs tabs, because the code you commit is run through the linter.

Write however you want for the things that don't matter, the formatter always wins.

chuckhend• 2 years ago

Automating this with linter and formatter is great. It moves the argument over style and format to a one liner change to a lint config instead of mingling it with the with the main code change.

edflsafoiewq• 2 years ago

Style also involves things like "renaming variables", to take the article's example, which can't be automated away.

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

This. You either don't care about style or push the style automatically without any interaction. Every other option is bad to some extent.

But only use a linter if you will add your rules over the empty set. If you get a pre-built set and are expected to remove the ones you don't need, you are making a toxic environment.

arp2423• 2 years ago

It's impossible for any code formatter to be 100%. Where to put a blank line? Where to break a line? How to name a variable/function? etc. etc. Some try (e.g. prettier), and what you end up is frankly just bizarre code that's just ugly. Never mind tons of other small things that often don't really matter.

The solution is to just not be too anal about it. It really is a cultural problem.

For example a few weeks ago I reviewed a PR from a new team member; there were some seriously structural problems with his approach, so I commented on that and ignored all the small stuff for now. Another programmer on my team also reviewed at the same time, and only commented on the small stuff that, IMHO, don't really matter, and didn't look at the general approach at all (which really was just all wrong, and also quite obviously wrong).

Not to be too arrogant about it, but I feel this sort of stuff is what distinguishes a "good engineer" from a "mid engineer".

chipdart21• 2 years ago

Enforce a code quality standard with a linter and formatter and be done with it

Adopting a linter does not eliminate style issues. It just eliminates the number of possible comments a PR can get over style issues by replacing all detailed feedback with just one comment with a very clear actionable request that's trivial to satisfy: "It seems X doesn't look right. Could you please run the linter?"

js82• 2 years ago

I think a good general advice when training somebody is - focus them only on the biggest flaw at the time. That's how I would proceed with a "bad" PR.

I would even accepts smaller issues (style) when there is a bigger issue to fix. People might eventually outgrow it.

eddd-ddde2• 2 years ago

For me it's the opposite. If I'm making a PR, please point out ALL of the nits you can even think about. My next PR is bound to have at most 25% of that since by now I get more about what the team values and considers important.

PhilipRoman• 2 years ago

IMO the best way to handle stylistic choices (if at all) is to have the reviewer just adjust it themselves. Ping-pong with comments like "add empty line" is a waste of time for everyone.

paiute• 2 years ago

I like this idea, it has the bonus of revealing how much the reviewer actually cares. I bet half the things they wouldn’t take the time to fix themselves.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 2 years ago

Not just stylistic choices - I absolutely love the way ex. gitlab lets you do a suggested change in a comment, precisely because it lets me do all the work and the MR owner just has to click to accept if they agree. That lowers the bar for what I'm willing to bring up in the first place (though I personally still don't like to comment on matters of style or taste) while making it less work for everyone, which makes it much easier to give useful suggestions:)

grecy• 2 years ago

Ping-pong with comments like "add empty line" is a waste of time for everyone.

And any manager that lets it happen without severe reprimands to the time-waster isn't worth working for.

We've all got way more important things to be spending our time on.

watwut• 2 years ago

IMO, the best way is to have automatic formatter shared by team.

EliRivers2• 2 years ago

have the reviewer just adjust it themselves

Passive-aggressive minefield. Someone will see a change done to THEIR code, without the changer even asking, and it will feel like the person who did it is a passive aggressive dickhead. Resentment will brew, tempers will be lost. It will only get worse from there. Software engineers already aren't exactly known for their humbleness and ability to swallow their ego.

mdaniel• 2 years ago

I like GitLab's feature of "suggested change" whereby the submitter can offer the change as a one-click "accept change" but importantly the change is still under the original author, because in any sane(?) review process, authors are not able to approve their own merge request. In your workflow if the reviewer checked out the branch, did the needful, committed, and then resumed reviewing they'd have locked themselves out of approving (err, assuming the aforementioned "authors cannot approve their own merges")

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/revie...

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/appro... and https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/appro...

chipdart21• 2 years ago

IMO the best way to handle stylistic choices (if at all) is to have the reviewer just adjust it themselves.

How does that inform the PR author that they failed to pay attention to a relevant detail, and more importantly contribute to not make it again?

If there is no feedback, problems will persist.

Nit comments add noise and failures to comply with a style guide is always a distraction on a PR, but that does not mean style guide violations should be ignored. It means that your team must work their way into making them a non-issue.

This means establishing an objective and usable set of rules and guidelines, and enforce them programmatically with a linter, not turning a blind eye to style violations.

herpdyderp2• 2 years ago

This kind of feedback has largely been solved, for me / my team at least, with linters and formatters (as mentioned in the article). So I'd say it is still a reflection on the code review process being broken.

SketchySeaBeast• 2 years ago

Yeah, if you care about it enough to stop a PR because of something and that something can be automated, automate it.

johannes1234321• 2 years ago

There is a lot of stuff a linter can't do, which however are stylistic choices some people care a lot about. Naming being a big one. Which terms to abbreviate how etc. Also there are a lot of things where automatic highlighting is possible, but any rule needs exceptions which a re subjective (nesting, usage of "raw" looos, early exit, ...)

Trying to get some consistency there can be good. And teaching new team members the "habits and traditions" may simplify long term maintenance.

However could review tools aren't a good place for distinguishing between "hey, this is good, but I'd like this slightly different" from "there is an actual issue" but that has to be solved somehow by communication. Which often isn't the best skill for engineers.

roland35• 2 years ago

Yes exactly! Reviews should not waste time with format - I would take the hour to set that up in CI and never worry about it again.

Or if that is too much (no shame!), just accept style differences.

greatgib2• 2 years ago

In lots of case linters might be harmful also. It is one thing to have a style guide people follow in most cases, it is another one to rigidly force everywhere the style that the linter enforce.

Especially because most linters will impose that everyone on the team will use them.

For example, if we take Python, there is black that is bat shit and makes your code less readable but adopted by so many teams as cargo cult because doing that signal that you are a cool, hype, best practice following team...

In the end with "black", people are forced to abide by the style of the random guy that created it, that is not exactly following the PEP8 or the zen of python, and is just itself created in cargo cult inspired by go and rust, and Python creator even advised against using it for readability except in special cases like very very big teams.

OptionOfT• 2 years ago

This is why I love things like cargo fmt / go fmt / eslint / etc.

No discussions of whether

    if (foo) return;

is valid, or we should do

    if (foo) {
        return;
    }

hibikir• 2 years ago

That's also why I dislike it: The mind that will go apeshit over trivial style nonsense will still provide unhelpful feedback on other topics... but it will become far less obvious that their comments should be downgraded.

Formatters also do a poor job if your language is flexible and expressive. Great for go, but if your language is the kind that easily supports internal DSLs, formatters are not even helpful at making the code regular

mihaaly3• 2 years ago

Who cares?!

theshrike79• 2 years ago

Just having a valid .editorconfig for the project will do a lot for languages without gofmt.

chipdart21• 2 years ago

This is why I love things like cargo fmt / go fmt / eslint / etc.

I agree. Once I had the displeasure of working with a junior dev who was very prolific in posting comments on style and if a space should be at the left or at the right of a symbol. It took me a few days of dealing with that noise to onboard a linter.

Even so the junior dev felt entitled to manifest how high their standards were by posting a torrent of comments in the PR that onboarded the team's official linter config.

But once the PR was approved and merged, surprise surprise: the junior dev's PR comment metrics dropped from dozens per PR to zero. The style guide didn't even had to be enforced.

The last I've heard about the junior dev was throwing a tantrum when one of their PRs received a comment from another team member asking to run the linter because it failed to adhere to the team's official style guide. Apparently the high standards and this attention to detail only went one way.

onion2k• 2 years ago

It says PR comments benefit the reviewer in some way, and they're not always left to improve the code or to help the person who opened the PR. For example, if you work in a culture where being seen to leave PR comments is seen as positive regardless of the quality of them, or even that code review is a tracked metric that contributes to your performance review.

That culture will turn even the most conscientious dev into a monster.

chipdart21• 2 years ago

Most of it was stylistic nitpicking.

One man's "stylistic nitpicking" is another man's violation of the company's official coding guidelines.

Does the company adopted a linter? If so,why has the new hire not applied it before posting the PR?

Imagine a new hire throwing a hissy fit because even though the whole company writes code in PascalCase he feels that snake_case is better.

Imagine a new hire decided that tabs are better than spaces, and proceeded to reformat 30% of a source file leaving behind wonky indentation.

Shall we tolerate code that has both just so that random internet people in a random online forum can rail against PRs?

Or shall we post a comment in a PR pointing why the code should be reformatted?

Larrikin• 2 years ago

Using snake_case everywhere when you should be using camelCase should have been one or two comments at most. It's toxic to go through every use and comment

prh82• 2 years ago

I've worked with plenty of devs who embody the toxicity here, lots of stylistic nitpicks and don't see the big picture. All the noise generated distracts from catching the important stuff.

Joker_vD2• 2 years ago

...just how big was that "first ever contribution" pull request that it gathered 300 comments? My first commit in the current company was a 2-liner addition to an existing function plus another 20 lines for a test that verified that indeed, the change does affect the outcome.

barbazoo6• 2 years ago

Even a simple (and very appropriate for a junior/newbie) change like you suggested could invite dozens of comments if the engineers don't know what they're doing.

Joker_vD2• 2 years ago

"Dozens" means "at least 24", so that'd been slightly more than 2 comments per line in my example. Which is an insane amount of comments by any standard imaginable: because long before you reach 1-1 comments-to-code ratio, you'd stop, and write a single "no, all of this is a wholly incorrect approach, complete re-do is needed" comment instead.

zie1ony2• 2 years ago

Recently I allowed everyone in my team to push to develop without PRs and even without doing feature branches. We review the code all together (max 2 ppl) just before the release and that's it. But great CI pipeline is must for this. It will get even better soon when AI will be able to slightly refactor the code.

lapcat• 2 years ago

We review the code all together (max 2 ppl) just before the release and that's it.

Is there a reason why you don't review the code immediately? You could also do that without PRs.

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

Yeah, I've heard arguments for this, and it always feels weird to me. Why go so long without review? That's just giving developers - junior and senior - opportunity to dig themselves into a hole that they don't notice until someone points out, "hey, your last five commits are buggy, but that matters less than the fact that they're implementing the wrong thing."

BurningFrog2• 2 years ago

Another angle is that a PR with over 300 comments is probably way too big.

Many small focused PRs is IMAO much better than big PRs with weeks or months of work in them.

But that requires fast and friendly PR reviews!

eddd-ddde2• 2 years ago

It also requires good tooling and some experience.

GitHub absolutely sucks at making multi-commit features. At least last time I used it.

And getting people to actually make smaller commits and reviews is incredibly hard.

herpdyderp2• 2 years ago

Can confirm GitHub's process is poor for small PRs (if that's what you mean by "multi-commit features"). My team has mostly gotten around this with custom CLI tools (for pushing small PRs chained together) and web apps (for concisely viewing your code review status, both giving and receiving).

gboss• 2 years ago

Whenever I encounter a pull request that I find many issues with, I ask to meet with the engineer and review it one on one. More than half of the workplace problems engineers have is due to their introverted nature and their refusal to get on a teams/zoom call to explain their issues and get resolution. Comments are a really poor mechanism for teaching programming best practices.

BurningFrog2• 2 years ago

At my last job, the rule was if the PR is big enough, get on a call and go over it in person. ideally with more than one "reviewer", to break stalemates. Worked really well!

I used to be that introverted guy, but a few years of pair programming completely cured that, and I'm now very comfortable discussing design in detail and at length, in a (if I may say so myself) friendly and constructive way.

If you've never discussed design with other people, it's a genuinely difficult thing to do!

skydhash• 2 years ago

A PR big enough should probably have its changes implemented and reviewed unit by unit on a feature branch before its creation. Or it should be an already approved work (refactoring, reformatting,...)

mckn1ght5• 2 years ago

I would love this approach, but the people reviewing my PRs are 10 tzs ahead of me, so we basically can’t meet synchronously unless someone is willing to meet early in the morning or late in the evening.

Maybe prerecorded code walkthroughs would help here, but nothing replaces instant face to face pairing. That’s where you can provide somewhat nitpicky feedback but with the empathy that comes with our instinctual responses to body language and voice tone… which over time builds a much better culture IMO.

barbazoo6• 2 years ago

I recommend using something like https://github.com/erikthedeveloper/code-review-emoji-guide in code reviews to signify what your expectation is exactly.

SoKamil• 2 years ago

Can you share your experience with this kind of review process?

barbazoo6• 2 years ago

I can mirror what their docs say

Using CREG (Code Review Emoji Guide) puts more ownership on the reviewer to give the reviewee added context and clarity to follow up on code review. For example, knowing whether something really requires action (), highlighting nit-picky comments (), flagging out of scope items for follow-up () and clarifying items that don’t necessarily require action but are worth saying ( , , )

jchw• 2 years ago

Personally I have a strong distaste for projects that try to use some metric for how long a function should be, e.g. line count or cyclomatic complexity. I'm not sure if this one is better automated, human judgement for what makes sense seems better to me. Sometimes the cleanest and highest performance way to write some code is going to be basically one relatively large function. If there's a function complexity/size lint I'll often chunk off helper functions that are virtually useless outside of that specific function, and in doing so, often make it harder to follow what's going on.

This isn't universally true of course, but it's a "when not if" situation if you have a hard lint limit and it's not very high. (e.g. In my opinion if you're going to have a lint for this, set it to something rather obscene, something that would be extremely hard to cross without doing something clearly awful. In my opinion it's always been set at least 4 times lower than it should be.)

Kinrany2• 2 years ago

It shouldn't be a hard rule, but in most cases a sufficiently long function will have opportunities for pulling out functions with sensible signatures that make sense outside that context.

All a linter does automatically is require adding the "ignore this line" comments that are then visible to humans in diffs.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

A linter directive also tells humans that somebody has decided that the function being long is acceptable in this specific location. It's been acknowledged. In many cases, that's all I want.

bsder• 2 years ago

in most cases a sufficiently long function will have opportunities for pulling out functions with sensible signatures that make sense outside that context.

And will make understanding the function a lot more difficult.

If you want an example of this, look at any C++ code that uses DX12 or Vulkan. It will be atomized sufficiently that you'll have to hunt through dozens of files to figure out which constructor/destructor where something fired. Part of the problem is that C++ discourages naked functions operating on structs rather than member functions on classes.

Whereas, if those functions were still all linear in a single function, you'd find what you were looking for in the same file you were already in.

That having been said, I'll probably organize that big function as though it were separate functions. But, then, I'm not allergic to adding an extra block level here or there which GASP might exceed 80 columns.

praptak2• 2 years ago

Linux C style guide has this summarized pretty well:

"The maximum length of a function is inversely proportional to the complexity and indentation level of that function. So, if you have a conceptually simple function that is just one long (but simple) case-statement, where you have to do lots of small things for a lot of different cases, it’s OK to have a longer function.

However, if you have a complex function, and you suspect that a less-than-gifted first-year high-school student might not even understand what the function is all about, you should adhere to the maximum limits all the more closely."

"Less-than-gifted first-year student" is btw a great bar for the conceptual complexity. Another one I've seen elsewhere is "An SRE not familiar with the code woken up at 3 AM to troubleshoot an outage".

loeg• 2 years ago

This is essentially a rough measure of cyclomatic complexity.

arp2423• 2 years ago

What really matters is "can I understand what this function roughly does at a glance?" In general, "length of function" is a reasonably-ish proxy for it, but as your quote says, sometimes longer is okay, and sometimes there are also other factors than just "length of function".

Either way, the question you should be asking during review is "can I understand this function?" and not "how long is this function?"

donatj2• 2 years ago

My team has a bike shedding sort of problem where a 100 loc PR will sometimes get scrutinized to hell, but a 3,000 loc PR will get LGTM'd by enough of the team to be merged before anyone that actually cares gets a chance to look at it. I would say the second half of that is the much bigger problem.

People know who to ask to get a quick lgtm.

I don't know what to do about it. I can't make people actually review. I've had unrealistic dreams like holding people responsible for things they approved that had bugs, but anything like that would be supremely unpopular. I could do something like requiring review from the team members that actually review, but they already feel overwhelmed by being the only ones that actually review.

We tried setting soft limits on the size of PRs, but that comes with a lot of PR that are hard to review because the work is poorly divided and doesn't make sense in isolation.

simmschi• 2 years ago

Have you tried the code owners feature (assuming you're on Github).

IMO a good approach is to have the actual code owners (i.e. the team responsible for a specific service or library) review the PR. If they think a shallow LGTM review of 3k LOC is enough, they can also deal with the bugs :-)

If you don't have specific ownership in your code base I'd start there.

donatj2• 2 years ago

This is all within a relatively small single team.

As I said however, I could require review from specific people I know review but they're already at their wits end.

Also having to explain why certain devs are required without it smelling like some sort of favoritism seems fraught.

Kinrany2• 2 years ago

Anything you do to make people fix their 3000 loc PRs will be unpopular with those people

sundbry2• 2 years ago

This, you should make soft and hard limits on PR sizes, providing exceptions only for automated changes or rare situations such as structural changes.

js82• 2 years ago

The reality is that you can't make people to care more about quality than their (yours) management cares about it.

I would suggest discuss this with manager, and if he cares enough about quality, he can try to slowly coach the individuals to give better reviews. Or he can suggest that multiple experienced/reliable people also review the work.

lijok• 2 years ago

Speaks volumes to the maturity of our work that a 3000 LOC PR is seen not only as acceptable, but expected.

Raising a planning change equivalent to a 3000 LOC PR in a civil engineering firm would get your assignment swiftly handed over to someone more competent.

loa_in_• 2 years ago

LOC is a bad measure of literally anything. It's not related to productivity, efficiency, bug count, readability, etc. What it's most related to is the choice of language and libraries. For me, shunning big contributions just for being big just stifles my drive to contribute. If the solution does what it's supposed to, is valid, efficient and there's no obvious unnecessary duplication of codethen who cares if it's big. All valid contributions push the project forward.

DontchaKnowit• 2 years ago

How are you supposed to write new code without hitting a 3k loc pr?

Olreich• 2 years ago

But the planning change to add a new wing to the building? That can’t be made smaller. What about if a new regulation is put in effect requiring every fire door to have a corresponding fire window next to it? That’s either 3000 little changes that need reviewing or one big change. One big change is often the correct choice. Knowing when it’s appropriate and when it’s not is the job of the engineer, the team, and the lead.

Leherenn• 2 years ago

Something helpful I have seen in this situation is to require the reviewer to test the changes for long PRs, and post proofs (a screenshot, logs, ...).

Even with the best of intentions, it's easier to miss things in longer PRs, plus it gives more time for others if they want to have a look. It's not bulletproof of course, but at least it makes sure the basic functionality is working.

rudasn• 2 years ago

Agree. I've made it a habit the past few years to include before/after screenshots in my PRs and sometimes a screen capture of the UI/workflow changes. Also, screenshots in the issues pages for bugs or anything UI related.

I find it makes it easier for people to see and understand the goal of your changes and helps them focus on the how in the code review.

When others do that in their PRs I can jump straight into the tests files and get a better understanding of the what is proposed (or at least start the review process in a more substantial way - get the important stuff addressed early on).

Aeolun8• 2 years ago

I like how when you ask people why they approved something obviously broken, they’ll say something like “Oh, I didn’t really look at it.”

I mean, I do that too once in a while, but if bugs go through you own that.

camgunz• 2 years ago

The answer is to require a high percentage of test coverage. Then you skim through the code to get a general idea of what it does and how, then scrutinize the tests to verify they enforce that understanding.

This does three things. First, it prevents people from dropping big chunks of code and asking their reviewers to make it work (if coverage is too low, it doesn't work). Second, the tests spare you the cognitive work of verifying the code does it's supposed to--especially edge and failure cases. Third, this frees you up to think about the bigger picture. Is this the right way to do this, should we be doing it at all, does this conflict with something else in the works, etc

random3• 2 years ago

It's never the process it's always the people and the underlying competence gap that kills morale.

dukedylan• 2 years ago

I'm shocked how many companies still don't focus on DevX and wonder why not only is productivity in the gutter, but morale as well. There's so many companies that help solve DevX problems like this, that's it's practically easy to throw money at it.

MortyWaves• 2 years ago

I ask myself this often, usually while despairing that the lead dev doesn’t see any point to build pipelines, unit tests, SQL migrations (literally right clicks and edits a database schema), and the requirement of needing Remote Desktop to a VM to do anything.

declan_roberts• 2 years ago

200 comments mostly about stylistic nitpicking is actually a language fault, not a team fault.

Languages like Golang are specifically designed to remove any stylistic nitpicking.

Every language must follow. It's suicidal otherwise.

agentultra• 2 years ago

Yes!

I’d also add that it’s helpful to have a review guideline.

When I get to the PR phase, I’ve already done the design work, considered the trade-offs, and am asking folks to check that the code is mergeable per our guidelines.

A pet peeve of mine are reviewers with a bone to pick who will leaving blocking comments to redo the work in the way they would have approached it.

A guideline helps here because you can, along with your team, manage expectations for the process.

Some folks like to throw up code for critiques. They use PRs to get feedback on the design/approach itself. That can be useful!

Going in to manage expectations helps smooth things along so that you’re giving the constructive feedback the author is looking for.

stared• 2 years ago

One core issue is that PRs are often too large. I don't believe there are 300 comments on a small PR unless the team is dysfunctional.

Aim to make them as atomic as possible. If it involves adding a significant feature that requires substantial changes to other modules, create a separate branch for it. Within this branch, break the work down into a series of smaller PRs.

When PRs are too large, the process usually suffers from insufficient reviews, excessive nitpicking, or (most often) a combination of both.

bsnnkv• 2 years ago

I can't imagine going back to working on codebases in languages that don't come with strongly opinionated defaults.

I'm very lucky to spend the majority of my dayjob hours working on Rust code, so everyone just runs cargo fmt && cargo clippy, and this in enforced in CI. You can't even publish a PR until those basic bars have been met.

I can't imagine the absolute insanity of working on JS projects where there are more ways to do things than there are people on a team, and where getting those people with strongly held opinions about things that ultimately just don't matter to agree on style and convention is like pulling teeth.

thiht4• 2 years ago

JS has excellent tooling for standardizing code style, Prettier for opinionated formatting and ESLint for everything else. If some teams decide to not use these tools, that’s their mistake.

Aeolun8• 2 years ago

Or Biome for both. And in 1 second instead of 10 minutes.

Sure, eslint has a few extra rules, but in my opinion it just doesn’t beat getting results at sub second speeds.

pyrale• 2 years ago

I wholly agree with this, and I would add worthless Sonar opinion reports th the list.

praptak2• 2 years ago

Combine this with a large timezone difference and you get a (literally) slow motion disaster. Imagine waking up and finding your change thoroughly reviewed but not approved because of a triviality. Not a great day.

hermanradtke• 2 years ago

My bias is towards merging. Trivial issues can be fixed in a future commit or PR.

mckn1ght5• 2 years ago

This is my life right now and it is terrible, can confirm. I’ve tried advocating for what you say to no avail. Or like, just opening a new PR into my branch, or directly committing to my branch. I’m not territorial, I just want progress. Instead people love to bicker and cover their own ass.

lkrubner2• 2 years ago

When it comes to code reviews, the return on investment faces the Law Of Diminishing Returns. While many of the comments made in code reviews might be interesting, they are not so interesting that they pay for themselves. If you put some dollar value on the time invested, you'll find that the vast majority of this process is simply burning money. And not only money, but also, as this article says, morale.

A curious fact about the politics of modern tech teams is that some of the same people who consider themselves "anti bureaucracy" are strongly in favor of this type of bureaucracy, even when it brings no measurable benefits.

My opinion of code reviews has become more negative over time, mostly due to the fact that I have not seen it achieve reliable positive outcomes.

I'll give specific examples:

https://www.futurestay.com had the worst code that I'd ever seen. When I joined the company I was horrified at the level of tech debt. And yet, for years, they had a rule that at least two engineers had to review every PR. So this terrible code, the worst I'd seen in my 24 years of coding, had been approved by two engineers.

And likewise:

https://openroadmedia.com also had very bad code, and also had a rule that nothing could be pushed to production until at least 2 engineers had reviewed the PR.

In both companies the code review slowed down the deployments, slowed the down the team, and created a culture of internal sniping, while leading to no improvements.

But how can I say the code was objectively bad? Because many bugs were found in production. And what would reduced the number of bugs in production? More tests, especially end-to-end tests. And so I eventually came to this conclusion: it is best to skip code review, and instead have the team invest that same time in writing more tests, especially high level tests. For the most part, if the engineers on a team are bad then the code reviews will also be bad, but if the engineers on the team are good, the the code reviews will not be needed. And in both cases, the path to improvement comes from writing the kinds of tests that ensure no bugs get into production.

As I've grown in my career, and taken on higher level management jobs, I've also realized that code reviews do not scale to large-scale leadership, but tests do. Code review seemed like a good idea when I was leading a team of 3 engineers, but not when I was leading a team of 30. When I was leading a team of 30, the only tool-of-oversight that worked for me was automated testing. And so I've concluded this is where the effort should be made. Sitting at my own computer, I cannot review the work of 30 engineers, but I can still run the tests on the various software, to see if they are passing. In particular, I can look at API interfaces and then change the dummy test data to break the tests, and this lets me see quickly thorough the test coverage is, and how prepared we are for unexpected shocks.

When I am running a team I will assign software developers the task of writing various tests, including high-level end-to-end stress tests. These tests sometimes reveal problems. We then respond to the problems. But we don't waste time responding to problems that have not been proven by a test, which is to say we do not do code reviews. Code reviews are all about predicting what might be a problem. But much of the concerns are phantoms. It is better to respond to real problems that have been revealed by tests.

I've also come to realize that software developers, quite naturally, develop strong opinions about questions of style, and yet these questions have no long-term impact on the health of the tech in the company. Other than enforcing the rules of some automated linter, the time spent on issues of style are 100% wasted. If you allow the team to spend even one minute discussing issues of style, then you are setting money on fire. But I know this opinion is unpopular, because software developers enjoy enforcing their own opinions about style. But it is all bikeshedding, it has no real-world impact.

I have the impression that there is some middle era, in the career of a software developer, where concerns about issues of style and organization tend to peak. The junior developer does not know enough to care about such issues, but somewhere between 4 years of experience and 10 years of experience, these issues feel important. I think you need more than 10 years of experience to see the waste. In particular, you need to run one large project where the team invests a lot of time into code reviews, and you need to notice how much tech debt builds up, despite the code reviews, to realize that code reviews do not offer a path forward.

On recent projects I've told the team there will be no code reviews, but instead we will focus on building tests. I get a surprising amount of pushback on this. Less experienced software developers get angry with me and tell me that I'm being unprofessional. In some sense they are correct, in the sense that "professional" refers to "standard norms that are accepted by a profession" -- I am deviating from those, clearly.

The most reasonable criticism I get is that code reviews could catch not just problems of style but problems of algorithms. What if, they ask, some junior developer introduces code that is ignorant of the implications of Big O Notation? What if they introduce code that runs in polynomial time? But I would ask, how do we know if it is running slowly? We can only know that through tests. So lets build tests that measure time, and stress test with large loads. Big O Notation offers an excellent example of where software developers can worry about the wrong thing: what if a junior level software developer writes code that runs in polynomial time but on data that will only ever have a few hundred records? While the algorithm might be sloppy, the code will run quickly because there are few records? In that case, any time invested to find a different algorithm will be a poor investment. Once I'm running a team of 30, the only thing I care about is whether code is actually slow, and I discover that through end-to-end stress tests, not code reviews.

Kent Beck, when he invented Xtreme Programming, also popularized the phrase "Do not write a comment, instead, write a method with an easy-to-understand name that communicates what the comment was going to communicate."

I've come to a similar conclusion. Do not write a comment in a code review, instead, write a test that would catch whatever danger you want to warn about. And if you cannot find a way to express your concern as a test, the return-on-investment of worrying about that concern is probably zero, so we should ignore it.

dmurray• 2 years ago

I've come to a similar conclusion. Do not write a comment in a code review, instead, write a test that would catch whatever danger you want to warn about. And if you cannot find a way to express your concern as a test, the return-on-investment of worrying about that concern is probably zero, so we should ignore it.

What if your concern is "this approach makes the code difficult to test"?

lkrubner2• 2 years ago

You discover that by writing the test. You don't try to predict that ahead of time. The goal is to get away from trying to predict problems ahead of time, because most of those problems turn out to be phantoms.

hnlurker22• 2 years ago

I worked at a startup where a developer used to bully other developers in PRs. Management looked away. I warned them but they didn't listen. That team is now dissolved.

rileymat23• 2 years ago

Part of me wonders if the real issue is we don't have an author/editor type system. If the reviewer/editor could just make the nitpicky changes in about the same time it takes to call them out, the relationship might be much more healthy. Things could go back and forth in a much more healthy way.

t-writescode2• 2 years ago

Jetbrains SpaceCode (rip), Github and Gitlab all provide that sort of system. I imagine the other ones do, too.

rileymat23• 2 years ago

Sorry, I was not clear. I don’t mean software system, but a culture of operating in that way.

Even the language “Code Review” is not one of cooperation, but creates thoughts of a “movie review” where one rates and finds error; not collaboration and mutual editing.

tremon• 2 years ago

We do, in a way, but it's not recognized as such. The "author" would be the mythical 10x developer that races to get feature tickets completed, the editors are the ones getting stuck with integrating a pile of stinking hotness into the existing codebase. That kind of setup can work fine if everyone is aware of the others' value, but usually non-technical managers only see the hotness.

powersnail2• 2 years ago

I don't know the original story, but 300 hundred PR comments on a first PR (or any PR for that matter) is insane, and my guess is that somebody on the team is having an argument back-and-forth in that PR, rather than focusing on whether the code should be merged.

If that happens to me, I would kindly invite them to talk about it elsewhere and give me pass, because the fact that you guys are still debating it, means that it's not a decided thing, and you can't prosecute me with a law that hasn't passed yet. Once it's actually settled, I'll be happy to go back and refactor it, but it is illogical to make it a blocker in the present.

It also sounds like something is wrong with the on-boarding process. The first PR should not be of such a nature that would invite loads of comments. It should be something that is functionally simple, and already has an agreed-upon design.

steveBK1232• 2 years ago

I was once on a team where this was not unusual, and the problem was the tech lead was the one engaging in 300 PR comment arguments.

This would result in stuff sitting in purgatory forever.

The funniest part was this was, in 20 years, the absolute worst codebase I'd ever seen, so he wasn't even maintaining some high standards in the codebase by doing so.

powersnail2• 2 years ago

Sounds about right. If so many technical decisions are made by a single individual while reviewing PR, rather than having a proper standard agreed upon before hand, it's no wonder that it grows into a horrible code base.

nmstoker• 2 years ago

This is really important to get right. There's a balance as you want to avoid introducing crap but a little restraint and wider awareness makes a huge difference.

I recall being significantly put off after making my first significant contribution online to a non-trivial repo.

I was a volunteer and had been making various very modest contributions (ie simple fixes) along with efforts around docs and answering questions from users. A major contributor was known for being cantankerous. He knew what I was bringing in general, and seemed grateful yet didn't hold off with pretty forceful feedback on my first attempt at something more substantial - I had taken a day off to get it in good shape, I knew it was solving something with broad use (ie not just for me!). There were a litany of points. I fixed several but each time there would be more, it was like water on Gremlins! I gave up and stood back for a bit. Ironically it would have been trivial for him to take the code in but it sat forever and the whole thing was a waste of time but I guess I learned a few things!

I try to encourage standards but not officiously!

patrickhogan1• 2 years ago

I’ve had a PR into an open source Anthropic library open for almost 2 months. It passes all of their rules, fixes an obvious bug that causes functional issues, passes all tests, and has a description that is descriptive with a complete user story explaining the functional issue with images. I really like using Claude and I like Anthropic’s mission but it definitely kills morale to fix something and be put into PR purgatory.

jibbit• 2 years ago

People being an obstacle to positive change, because they believe a better change is possible.. when the changes wouldn't in any way prevent further positive changes from happening.. are the bane of my life. 'bikeshedding' probably covers it, but i feel like if someone could come up with a better metaphor that wasn't specifically about triviality or level of comprehension it could be a profound contribution to human behaviour

tired_and_awake• 2 years ago

If you join a company and are confronted with dozens of PR comments - assuming this process isn't sufficiently well documented - see if a tech lead or manager will host an open forum review. Review the code and the comments and discuss + document. A one off discussion won't be a permanent fix, but it can help!

sibit• 2 years ago

I have always found articles/discussions of code reviews fascinating. In the 10(ish) years I've been employed as a programmer I've never worked in a department with more than ten people and every time the work is distributed such that each person works as an IC on their own siloed project(s). Receiving anything besides the "LGTM" rubber stamp or nitpick comment seems almost impossible.

whynotmaybe• 2 years ago

Define (and Stick To) a Style Guide

We have some styling rules that are so much in the "Style Over Substance" category that I have a strong tendency to subconsciously categorize them as "not important, at all". Especially when the IDE doesn't respect them when you use the code generation.

But as it was a strong irritant for some PR reviewers, and as I couldn't force my mind stop doing it, I automated it by writing a custom linter.

anothername12• 2 years ago

I have quit places because of their PR process.

mshekow• 2 years ago

I found two ideas / techniques helpful in this context:

1) Conventional comments (https://conventionalcomments.org/) as an (agreed-upon) language to be used in PR comments

2) Ship / Show / Ask (https://martinfowler.com/articles/ship-show-ask.html), where "Show" and "Ship" are non-blocking PRs (or even directly committing to trunk, if you use trunk-based development), since not every(!) PR needs reviewing and/or should block the PR creator

ilaksh• 2 years ago

The only thing I disagree with him on this is that function length doesn't matter. Longer functions do tend to be harder to understand. I will admit that sometimes a lot of helper functions can make it harder to piece together, so you can overdo it, but usually putting one or two of them back into the main function gives a very readable function.

So I would tend towards more smaller more decomposed functions with descriptive (but concise as possible) names by default. This is very different from old-fashioned C standards, which I feel are very outdated for modern tooling and hardware.

It's definitely important to have formatting standards to avoid arguments about that. But you are never going to completely eliminate stylistic things because part of that is function decomposition or intersects with the actual substantive design. Because some people feel quite differently about function size for example.

Aeolun8• 2 years ago

Where do people find these places? I have a hard time getting management to accept that more restrictions on who can review is not a bad thing.

Nearly 90% of our PR’s have zero comments.

I do have a hard ban on formatting comments though. If it’s not covered by the linter/formatter everything goes.

chromanoid• 2 years ago

Non blocking code reviews ftw

https://itnext.io/optimizing-the-software-development-proces... Optimizing the Software development process for continuous integration and flow of work

https://medium.com/itnext/how-feature-branches-and-pull-requ... How feature branches and pull requests work against best practice

swisniewski• 2 years ago

I usually adopt a policy with my teams:

You are not allowed to complain about style in code reviews.

If it’s important enough for your to comment about, it’s important enough for you to add a linter to the build and block the build if the style isn’t met.

If it’s not worth enough of your time to add a linter, it’s certainly not worth your peer’s time to deal with comments about style.

scotty79• 2 years ago

Code reviews are weird. I joined a very small team as a new developer. I got a task, solved it but at code review the senior developer told me to solve it in another specific way. I coded it and it was fine. The situation repeated for few next tasks. It was a bit frustrating because I felt like doing the job twice while "pre-review" of my tasks by the ultimate code reviewer before I started doing them could save both my time and his. But it just wasn't part of the process.

Does such thing have a name? A quick check up with a reviewer about whether my plan for implementing the task is align with their preferences?

PR process killing morale and productivity

Related Stories