> I often saw people make unnecessary complex or large PRs that were too much workload to review, leading the reviewer to approve, on the grounds of ”seems like you know what you’re doing and tbh I don’t have half a day to review this properly”
That just seems like company wide apathy to me. Obviously you have to make an effort to read the code, but there are lots of ways developers can overcomplicate things because they were excited to try a pattern or clever solution. It doesn't make them bad devs, it's just an easy trap to fall into.
These should not pass a code review just because the code "works." It's totally acceptable to say "we're not gonna understand this in 3 months the way it's written, we need to make this simpler" and give some suggestions. And usually (if you're working with people that care about the workload they make for others) they will stop after a few reviews that point this out.
We've done this at our company and it's helped us immensely. Recognizing whether the code is unnecessarily complex or the problem is inherently complex is part of it, though.
That just seems like company wide apathy to me. Obviously you have to make an effort to read the code, but there are lots of ways developers can overcomplicate things because they were excited to try a pattern or clever solution. It doesn't make them bad devs, it's just an easy trap to fall into.
These should not pass a code review just because the code "works." It's totally acceptable to say "we're not gonna understand this in 3 months the way it's written, we need to make this simpler" and give some suggestions. And usually (if you're working with people that care about the workload they make for others) they will stop after a few reviews that point this out.
We've done this at our company and it's helped us immensely. Recognizing whether the code is unnecessarily complex or the problem is inherently complex is part of it, though.