The Code Review Comment That Made Me Quit My Job

Most people don’t leave jobs over one sentence. But for me, it was one sentence, buried in the middle of a code review, that broke the camel’s back.

At first, it was unremarkable. Just another nitpick out of an infinite stream of nitpicks. But it felt different than all the others. It wasn’t a syntax thing. It wasn’t a correctness thing. It was a deeper thing. A corrosive thing that had been brewing under the surface within the team for months.

Culture of Reviews

Code reviews are supposed to be a safety net. They catch bugs before they get into production, enforce consistency, and teach more collaborative junior engineers to grow. If done well, I think they’re one of the best ways to mentor in software.

If done poorly, they will be used as weapons.

In my team, review culture had gradually shifted from being constructive collaboration to a subtle way of showing who is better than who. Every PR became a battleground. Every line of code was an opportunity to “demonstrate” intelligence and superiority. Comments were no longer about the code, they were about ego.

The Comment

The comment was 8 words.

“Did you even think before writing this?”