Ask HN: What is a common PR review time at your company?
I find myself frequently frustrated by waiting for PR reviews. There is tons of writing on the internet about short review times being better for productivity, and lots of tips-n-tricks for how to reduce PR review time.
I've started to consider that my expectations are just wrong. I'm curious what other experiences are like. What is an average duration range for your PRs to get approved or changes requested? I'm totally fine with anecdotal responses.
On my team we expect that everyone looks at PRs at least once a day. If something is particularly pressing, they can post a message to our internal team channel for a faster response.
Has heavily depended on employee incentives.
At some employers, particularly the Scrum point counting ones, PRs were unrecognized work, so everyone avoided them unless hounded and then people traded PR approvals at the end to score more points as “done.”
At employers that didn’t care about points complete per sprint, it depended on the overall importance of the work as the team leads jumped in to have them done. But even then, as it wasn’t recognized as work in any way, during crunch it got abandoned.
I think the "not recognized as work" part feels similar to my experience but I don't really understand the psychology of it. Work is not done until it is reviewed and merged, so the review part is necessarily a part of the work cycle. I don't get the sense that you're advocating for the "not recognized as work" perspective, just responding to that viewpoint you shared.
Nobody has ever praised me or (as far as I know) a colleague for reviewing work. Certainly not a manager.
My reviewing doesn't show up in Jira under the amount of work I completed.
No performance review of mine has ever mentioned reviewing code.
In summary, there is minimal credit to be had from doing the work and even when there is credit, nobody lets you exchange that credit for much.
Yes, by rule reviewing is considered work, but it is not work anyone gives you much credit for doing. As an individual with incentives not aligned with the company most of the time, that makes it not worth prioritizing.
So I suppose it is recognized as work, but it is the least rewarded of the work you could be doing.
I've definitely been praised for regularly doing timely reviews, but I imagine your experience is probably more common and why that mindset is widespread.