The day a junior dev embarrassed me in a code review at Buffer

Back in 2019 I was working at a startup in Austin and thought I knew everything about clean code. A junior dev pulled me aside after a review and showed me how my "elegant" one-liner was actually 3x slower than a simple for loop. He had benchmarked it with real data from our production servers. I argued with him for 10 minutes before I actually ran his test myself. He was right - my code was 40% slower on large datasets. That's when I stopped treating code reviews like a competition and started actually listening to everyone on the team. Has anyone else had a moment where someone way more junior taught you something fundamental?

2 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

2 Comments

ryantorres1mo ago

Started doing "pre reviews" before formal reviews where I'd walk through my code with whoever was around. Took the ego out of it since everyone saw each others WIP anyway.

3

wells.olivia1mo ago

Man, it's wild how that same thing plays out everywhere, isn't it? @ryantorres, putting your work out there raw before the "real" thing just kills all the weird tension and makes people actually helpful instead of judgey. It's like the difference between asking someone to check your spelling vs. asking them to grade a final paper.

-1