What are your programming hot takes?

This was my experience too. At first I found code reviews to be an invaluable resource for improving my code. But I then reached a point where I'd learned everything I could from a particular reviewer.

I'd submit code that met every criteria, but the reviewer would still nit pick on tiny details that were entirely subjectective. It was no longer about the quality of code it became about the reviewer trying to put their mark on my work.

The only solution was to either ignore their nits or adopt the hairy arm technique whereby you include intentional errors for the reviewer to comment on so they feel their time had been valuable and you get away without yours being wasted.

I worked with a guy who brought 10k lines of code from various jobs over the years and slapped it all into a single commit second day on the job.

It was all VB.NET and looked like it was written in VB6 days because it was reimplementing functions that the .NET framework already provided us. And there were quite a few single line functions that did the simplest things like addition of two variables.

However my favorite function of all was IsMarksMachine() because it was used as a prod/dev switch. I ran into bugs testing the code and got the "Worked on my machine" line. Turned out the code branch under IsMarksMachine() somehow worked, but in all other cases, it didn't.

Mark is not the real name. But man was he a bad coder.

That doesn’t mean you are a shit coder, you are just likely forgetful. I also find stupid shit in my committed code, though that is also due to me not caring too much (I guess I really have burned out at my previous work place).

Now I’m at a better job, hopefully I can take proper care of my work here! Hopefully you don’t suffer from burnout.