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While reviewing a PR, you find some piece of code that seems to work perfectly well, but some functions are written in a style that you don't particularly favor. What do you do? (cupid.careers)

submitted 2 days ago by rglullis to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

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[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 points 2 days ago

Depends on how strange and impactful their choice is.

If it's something that I think should be in the style guide, I'd promise try to achieve consensus. I'd prefer not merging in the dubious code because then other people may take it as precedent.

One guy really wanted to write his code differently than the existing code and how others were doing it. It kind of sucked. Not that his way was bad, but no one else on the team subjectively liked it. I relented and let it go, and then had to deal with that unpleasant code for months. Eventually he moved on and a lot of that code got replaced. I retrospect I would have preferred if we had somehow convinced him to keep in the style we preferred. I'm sure he wasn't happy that the rest of the team wasn't keen on his style choices.

If it's just a little weird, mention it as a non blocking comment. Like one guy would have weird line breaks in his longer comments. It technically followed the guide (under max line length) but it was weird. We asked him to stop, he said ok, no problem. But I didn't block a merge over it.