A lot of this is hyperbolic whining.
Back when I worked for other people, I had the luxury (not a luxury) of being the mediator between the evil gremlin code reviewer and the wayward antihero programmers. Takeaways:
1. The evil gremlin code reviewer was almost always right, and was almost unequivocally the smartest programmer at the company.
2. Our antihero programmers not only tended to be wrong, they tended to be blatantly wrong in a way that worked on their machine, or worked for specific uses cases, but would never work in production.
3. The evil gremlin code reviewer was an asshole, liked being an asshole, and didn't care how many people thought he was an asshole.
4. The antihero programmers refused to learn how to be better programmers from the evil gremlin code reviewer, and the evil gremlin programmer refused to learn how to be educative, rather than castrative, in his code reviews.
5. Rather than serving as a quality enforcing function, most code reviews were spiked by the accounts team, meaning that evil gremlin code reviewer was in a perpetual state of frustration, antihero programmers were constantly in a cycle of post-production bug fixing/optimization, and the pace of development invariably ground to a halt over time.
6. No one cared how little I cared about this problem, but it was a nice excuse to not have to talk to the accounts team, and so I spent a lot of time listening to people whine.
Back when I worked for other people, I had the luxury (not a luxury) of being the mediator between the evil gremlin code reviewer and the wayward antihero programmers. Takeaways:
1. The evil gremlin code reviewer was almost always right, and was almost unequivocally the smartest programmer at the company.
2. Our antihero programmers not only tended to be wrong, they tended to be blatantly wrong in a way that worked on their machine, or worked for specific uses cases, but would never work in production.
3. The evil gremlin code reviewer was an asshole, liked being an asshole, and didn't care how many people thought he was an asshole.
4. The antihero programmers refused to learn how to be better programmers from the evil gremlin code reviewer, and the evil gremlin programmer refused to learn how to be educative, rather than castrative, in his code reviews.
5. Rather than serving as a quality enforcing function, most code reviews were spiked by the accounts team, meaning that evil gremlin code reviewer was in a perpetual state of frustration, antihero programmers were constantly in a cycle of post-production bug fixing/optimization, and the pace of development invariably ground to a halt over time.
6. No one cared how little I cared about this problem, but it was a nice excuse to not have to talk to the accounts team, and so I spent a lot of time listening to people whine.