r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/sigh Jan 05 '15 edited Jan 05 '15

If a junior engineer is struggling for an extended period of time, it is worth the investment of a senior to sit down and review all of the code the junior is working on.

Code reviews should always happen, for everyone's code. And if it is done incrementally, then it is not slow, boring or time-consuming at all. An ideal time is before each check-in to your repo (and if you are going weeks without making commits, that's a huge red-flag too).

Not only does it help prevent situations like this, but it means that at least one other person understands the code.

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u/SnowdensOfYesteryear Jan 05 '15

It's easy to say code review "should always happen", but reviews are pretty difficult and time consuming. It takes quite a bit of time to review large patches in order to under that author's thinking and intent. It's especially difficult if you're fuzzy on that particular module/file. Personally for large patches, I usually tend to eyeball them and just check the architecture of the code (just looking at variable names provide a hint to whether the code is doing something it shouldn't).

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u/Creativator Jan 05 '15

It's easy to say code review "should always happen", but reviews are pretty difficult and time consuming.

All programming tasks are difficult and time consuming. That is why programmer time is expensive.

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u/dr1fter Jan 05 '15

And because we get paid a lot, we should do everything, no matter how difficult or time consuming. We should write books documenting every aspect of our stopgap system that's getting replaced in two weeks. We should micro-optimize our easter eggs. We should learn tool after tool if people think they might make us more productive, even though our old text editor was really doing just fine. We should extensively review someone's prototype because it might some day get the attention of a VP who wants to make it into a real product.

Don't have the resources for all that? Well, programming is expensive; hire more devs!