Digital thoughts from a seasoned programmer About

I hate to say it, I was right

By Matt Raffel on August 28, 2025

The other day someone reviewed, approved, my PR adding a comment "This looks good to me, but I don't know if the expression is right" (I am being vague to protect privacy).

If the reviewer doesn't know if the expression is right, why approve it? I will start by making it clear, it's not the reviewer's fault.  The organization has a policy that anyone senior and above should be able to review any PR.  In fact, it has gone as far as to say particiation in PR process will be considered during individual performance review time. This is a bad policy.  It means that people are approving things they don't understand in order to comply with policy to ensure a positive impact on their review.  I can't blame them.

This goes back to what I have said earlier:  there needs to be "specialists" who are the primary go-to experts within certain domain knowledge of the system. The organization, coming from the top in this case, shot that idea down when one team made the case for it.  And so now we have this situation where people are approving things they don't understand.

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