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Is this a justified code review comment or a bully?

Code reviews are weakness of this industry which has the potential to attract bullies. Abuse of the comment box in a pull request and bombarding the employee with hundreds of comments can cause stress, frustration, burnout and finally resignation and costs of fulfillment for the organization. While companies should find and stop bullying in the work place, what kind of code review comment is considered a bully and why? Any of below traits can mean you are dealing with a bully:

1. Claims the code needs to be changed but doesn't say how. So no matter how many times you change your code, he can repeat the same comment: "Your code is still bad due to blah blah and it needs to be changed".

2. Provides how the code should be changed, but the change doesn't add up to quality, security, performance, readability, etc. i.e. "Why did you use a for loop here? Use a while loop instead". Or "Why did you write it using three classes A, B and C? Instead write it using 4 classes D, E, F and G which does blah blah". In the later case, not following the review comment, you won't get approval. Following the comment means you need to rewrite your whole code. After which, you might again receive more comments to change other parts of your code!

3. Claims the requested change is due to standards but claimed standard does exist anywhere. Internet, company wiki, university course books, anywhere. In more severe cases of psychopathy, the bullying person refers you to a link which hours later turned out to be written by himself! Have fun describing what has happened to your manager or team leader... .

4. Asks the code to be changed in a way that supposedly is closer to standard or of better quality, security, performance, etc. But the proposed way will not work and is the main reason you didn't do that in the first place. So you start arguing forever in the comment box over why his method won't work!

If you cannot see any of the above traits, then keep calm, take a breath, fix your code. Otherwise you might be victim of a bully.

Comments
  • 0
    I think posts like this will only arm know-it-all juniors against their seniors. And that's not a good thing.

    I think actual bullying is veeeery uncommon (never seen it happen) and if it does happen is super easy to bring up with the management since it's all documented in the comments.

    The bigger problem here is juniors not willing to learn and hammering through their approach they made up in their head in 5 minutes. I've been that person, and it doesn't help anybody. The junior doesn't learn and it wastes the senior's time that is already stretched thin in most cases.
  • 0
    @Froot four cases above are written by a senior software developer. All the ideas are focusing on the same fact: There must be a reason to change a code otherwise it's Unreasonable. The idea behind above post is to make it Easy to show what kind of comment is unreasonable and if repeated frequently, an example of bullying. I'm sorry if it helps other people stop bullies enjoying their cruel life.
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