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0 pointssidlls3y ago0 comments

I just strongly disagree with this. The context of a code review is the perfect opportunity to teach, much like a technical design review is for system designs, and having them sit as an observer during an incident response is for triage/debugging a live system under stress. There are no better settings for teaching these skills to juniors. And you should really let your senior engineers take advantage of these times to impart their wisdom. It will help them grow junior engineers into high quality seniors that will help make your team’s output better and faster in the long run.

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Ensorceled3y ago

> The context of a code review is the perfect opportunity to teach

I think we are just talking about different scales and different senior developers. Every code review is either teaching something, finding missed bugs, find better ways to do things that a senior developer makes full use of.

If not, your code review is just a preformative waste of time.

I'm talking about simple PRs, the kind I would assign to a junior developer, that are actually finished, getting held up while a "teachable moment" unfolds.

sidllsOP3y ago

But "simple PRs" with poor implementations compound over time and make for outsized tech debt in the future. I agree that addressing specific major issues within the PR (e.g. comments) is not a good approach. If there are "enough" (for some relatively subjective definition of that) "teachable" things, it's likely an in-person (or at least chat thread) conversation is warranted. Under normal circumstances (and I'd hope a junior engineer isn't making a PR to patch something for an emergency/incident resolution), a PR should be fine to hold up, as the release timeline should account for the fact that junior engineers will have longer PR cycles.

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