I read your comment, and then the article, and honestly, the article makes a lot of good points.
I had precisely one boss who was an asshole code reviewer - and the worst is that by then I was a far better programmer than he was, because he was crazy.
(Random example of many - he personally adopted a "foveal coding style" which meant that he pressed return at the first possible moment after 40 characters. Yes, 40. To achieve that, he had a whole glossary of local variable names, all starting with the same prefix, that you needed to learn to read his code - slea, sleb, slec, sled, slee, slef, etc. "sle" stood for serialized ledger entry, except that none of these were serialized and most weren't ledger entries...)
Even knowing he was an idiot, these abusive code reviews were surprisingly hard on me, particularly since I got forced to do a lot of stupid things with my name on it.
I started to get panic attacks, and they lasted for years.
I made a girl cry once with a code review when I was being purely formal - "this cannot work", that sort of thing. Maybe she was somewhat oversensitive, _but_ she was definitely overwhelmed by her new job, and it was not productive! It was just a mistake on my part.
So I am "brutal" and incredibly detailed in code reviews _but_ I'm also friendly and chatty and explain how I have also made that error in the past, which I certainly have because I have made a huge number of errors!, and tips on how to avoid these issues in the future, as well as some sort of programming language suggestion if appropriate.
People seem to really like it. I get a lot of kind words. It makes it much more fun if you see this as a collaborative game whose idea is to get the highest group scope than a competition.
(Also, it's the rare code review that I don't catch some actual bug in the code that would lead to wrong results, and if you point it out nicely, people really appreciate not having to debug that later.)
I had precisely one boss who was an asshole code reviewer - and the worst is that by then I was a far better programmer than he was, because he was crazy.
(Random example of many - he personally adopted a "foveal coding style" which meant that he pressed return at the first possible moment after 40 characters. Yes, 40. To achieve that, he had a whole glossary of local variable names, all starting with the same prefix, that you needed to learn to read his code - slea, sleb, slec, sled, slee, slef, etc. "sle" stood for serialized ledger entry, except that none of these were serialized and most weren't ledger entries...)
Even knowing he was an idiot, these abusive code reviews were surprisingly hard on me, particularly since I got forced to do a lot of stupid things with my name on it.
I started to get panic attacks, and they lasted for years.
I made a girl cry once with a code review when I was being purely formal - "this cannot work", that sort of thing. Maybe she was somewhat oversensitive, _but_ she was definitely overwhelmed by her new job, and it was not productive! It was just a mistake on my part.
So I am "brutal" and incredibly detailed in code reviews _but_ I'm also friendly and chatty and explain how I have also made that error in the past, which I certainly have because I have made a huge number of errors!, and tips on how to avoid these issues in the future, as well as some sort of programming language suggestion if appropriate.
People seem to really like it. I get a lot of kind words. It makes it much more fun if you see this as a collaborative game whose idea is to get the highest group scope than a competition.
(Also, it's the rare code review that I don't catch some actual bug in the code that would lead to wrong results, and if you point it out nicely, people really appreciate not having to debug that later.)
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