Respectful Leadership
Sometimes I write about leadership in a general sense, other times I write specifically about leading a tech team. This essay is an example of the latter, but I hope that every entrepreneur might appreciate the lesson here, which is that there are many rituals that are popular with some disciplines and professions, yet those rituals lack real value, and so if you’re an entrepreneur who is trying to move fast and save money, you’ll want to limit those rituals.
Nearly all software teams engage in code reviews, meaning that if one engineer writes some code, then other engineers can read that code and post criticism (typically using a site such as Github, which allows engineers to post code and review the code submitted by others). Sometimes engineers will leave dozens, or even hundreds, of comments, critical of the code that someone else has submitted. And the original engineer, who wrote the code, is expected to address all of the raised concerns before that code is allowed to go to production.
Over the years, I have become critical of code reviews. They burn up a lot of time and energy — which would be fine if they produced some important result, but they do not. While many of the comments made in code reviews might be interesting, they are not so interesting that they pay for themselves. If you put some dollar value on the time invested, you'll find that the vast majority of this process is simply burning money. And not only money, but also, as this article says, morale.
