Daniel O'Brien

"[...] programmers do not want to write code out in the open. Programmers don’t want their peers to see mistakes or failures. They want to work privately, in a cave, then spring “perfect” code on their community, as if no mistakes had ever been made. I don’t think it’s hubris so much as fear of embarrassment. Rather than think of programming as an inherently social activity, most coders seem to treat it as an arena for personal heroics, and will do anything to protect that myth." Very good. - Mustafa K. Isik

"During his first week, he started emailing friendly code reviews to each of his coworkers, receiving strange stares in turn. Eventually his boss called him into his office: “You know, you really need to stop with the negative energy. Your peers say that you’re constantly criticizing everything they do.” Moral: not only is code review not the norm in corporate environments, most programmers are unable to separate their fragile egos from the code they write. Repeat after me: you are not your code!" - Mustafa K. Isik

Thanks for the pointer to http://blog.red-bean.com/sussm... So true. So common. So $7UP1D. - Mustafa K. Isik

I agree with the basis of this post, but that anecdote is not great evidence IMHO. Doing things is always more valuable than feedback, in companies or in open source projects. Feedback is often obvious (yah, we all knew that piece of code blows, but it works, and now we are on to the other 20 things we need to do). It seems like the dude above should have established a little credibility by writing some code before starting "friendly code reviews." It doesn't surprise me he annoyed his new coworkers. - Bret Taylor

@Bret I agree with you on "doing rather than complaining". But I also believe in communicating and teaching each other. Leaving the exact context of the story aside, my personal experience with similar situations is that there are developers who don't know when they are writing bad code (happens to us all) and worse, don't necessarily want to. This seems to be especially true, if the illusion of code mastery is the foundation for an individual's self-esteem. - Mustafa K. Isik

IMHO the bane of our craft, science and art is that there is no meaningful set of metrics to distinguish from good and utterly mediocre developers. After all anybody who can get his/her programs to compile can call him-/herself a software developer and sometimes I get the impression that that is exactly what serves as predominant classification method. - Mustafa K. Isik

If a new developer started emailing me code reviews then they had better be (a) right, and (b) sensible. By that I mean that a lot of the time things that look to be stupid aren't, because there are restrictions and/or history which isn't obvious when you see the code in isolation. I would think he'd have been better off emailing to ask WHY things were done the way they were, rather than suggesting alternatives in his first week - Nick Lothian

@Nick Lothian In open source a code review doesn't have to be about making sure your code is right, it's about sharing. You might be a hugely better coder than me but if I review your code on a public list, suggesting alternatives, and you convince me that you're right, the code and the community has won. - Michael C. Harris

@Michael - to me the article read like the person had joined a company and was doing internal code reviews. The social norms for that are different to most open source projects I've worked on. - Nick Lothian