I’ve written plenty of bad code before, and some of it was released and some of that led to tricky bugs. I don’t feel particularly ashamed of having written bad code though. Maybe I’m thinking of a different kind of feedback? Like, hopefully the worst problems can be figured out before much code is written, and if someone made some asshole critical comment, I would probably consider it reflecting poorly on them rather than me (indeed I find the permanent record of the comments I left and since regretted weighs more heavily than the record of the comments received – or the poor code committed). But I guess different people react to feedback differently, especially critical feedback and maybe you’re imagining some kind of ‘the whole thing is totally wrong and terrible’ discussion? But that feels to me like a case where a bunch of blame belongs to whatever allowed a bunch of totally wrong code to begin to be written.

This.

Emails that have a long list of CCs suddenly become a political hothouse of "If I say X in front of Y it will seem like a criticism and they will clam up and then the whole thing becomes something the "positional authority" has to adjudicate not an experience led discussion"

I feel that this problem is the very reason FOSS mailing lists (ie Linux) were so brutal - it's that or you risk lack of clarity.

I know I sound like someone complaining about woke snowflakes, but there is a line somewhere around here and I wish I knew where it was

>When code reviews were in person, as a senior person, I could deliver feedback without that feedback becoming a public albatross stuck around someone's neck. We all screw up and miss things. Sometimes we don't write the best code. Sometimes we don't know something that should be universal knowledge.

Heh, I actually ran into a funny situation because of permanence of code review.

One time I was onboarding a new employee (call him Bob) to how pull requests worked in GitHub, and I wrote up a sample one from his computer. Just to be silly, and because I didn't realize the implications, I said "okay and you fill out the body, describing what you did. As an example, let me just put in some filler text, 'hey, you people suck'."[1]

I was planning to delete the obvious-garbage PR, but I didn't realize ... GitHub doesn't let you delete PRs, only close them! And it triggers emails!

Mercifully, no one said anything. But then months later, another co-worker (call him Charlie) was venting to me about what he didn't like about Bob: "And, another thing, one time, that asshole wrote up this pull request, where he said, hey, you people suck!"

So I owned up: "Oh, uh, Charlie, that ... was actually me. I was writing a dummy pull request to onboard Bob but sent it by accident."

Then Charlie said, "Well ... he's still an asshole!"

[1] I think I wasn't planning to submit it at all, but after a while Bob probably wanted to see it in action and I forgot to remove that part. (And yes, I also now make sure to use more innocuous filler text.)

I agree that submissions that bad shouldn't have a permanent record. If I see something egregious I'll ask the person in person, or via our chat software, and make a vague comment like, "Please make the changes we discussed over lunch," or whatever, in the comments of the submission.

In my experience, the problem you’re pointing out is a non-problem. I’ve never done an in person code review in my life that didn’t take place in an interview context. Yet, somehow none of my mistakes in writing code (and there have been many) have never become “a public albatross stuck around [my] neck.”

Is this a thing you’ve seen or just something you’re afraid might happen? If the former, I would say that’s an unhealthy work environment. If the latter, then why point it out?