I had a long response typed out to an up thread comment, then remembered the rule "don't feed the trolls". I did get a chuckle afterwards when I read their username, it certainly is apt.
Edit: oh God, I looked at his linked personal site and this isn't a parody account. I really hope this guy is drinking or something, he claims to have worked in VR/AR. Claiming that none of his coworkers in 20 years have been able to understand linear algebra, while working in that field?
For the most part you don't really need to understand linear algebra for most things -- engineers past have done a great job on abstracting interesting math problems away in everything.
If you're not constantly working with linear algebra, you're going to get rusty fast. Mind you, he seems like he writes a matrix multiplication with goto based loops every time, so he can make sure that he keeps knowing linear algebra, and to prevent the business he's working at from getting anything done because he doesn't like their ethics
I think he's probably above average in technical skills and below average in human skills. In that context it makes sense he doesn't like being told by others how to write code. I can imagine it can be frustrating if unqualified people review my code and make irrelevant comments, but usually if you're that good, why are you working with morons anyway?
I’ve seen this pattern a few times in my now long career. Above average Engineer with missing (social skills/theory/cs degree) ends up only getting experience at companies with sub par developers.
Sub par developers parrot industry recommendations such as code reviews or microservices, and Above Average anti-social dude asks why and gets a dumb answer, and out-engineers all the idiots trying to mimic industry best practices.
Now Above Average engineer’s ego expands even more. Not only is he smarter than everyone else, all these best practices are dumb too.
Look at all these people needing code reviews or unit tests, they still can’t ship. Those people doing it at Meta and Amazon must be dumb too.” They think.
The thing is, their arrogance and/or disdain for (whatever) endures they only get hired at companies where this cycle repeats.
It is not a “brag” to say none of the developers you’ve ever worked with don’t understand linear algebra, it means you only work with morons. Being the king of morons isn’t a thing to be proud of…
Some people just hate rethinking their views even if the other person is competent. I know people like that, smart and right about a lot of things, but can't admit that they are wrong ever. I can imagine code reviews being torture to such people.
What does any of this have to do with you thinking code reviews are worthless and slows down velocity? A whole reply of strawman arguments while tossing in the word 'milquetoast' doesn't make it intelligent.
As others have pointed out: code reviews exist for many complex projects even outside of these big companies. Code reviews existed before these companies.
I strongly agree that by and large we waste 99% of the compute resources available to us on useless abstractions.
However, this is an orthogonal issue to not reviewing code. To contrast, if we push code to production _before_ review, then production is much more likely to be full of bugs, and we force people to go looking for them afterwards. I've worked in this kind of environment, and the amount of wasted resources (both compute and engineering time) is staggering. Somebody's pet project ends up taking way more compute than anybody would have deemed acceptable and we have exactly the overhead and waste you are referring to.
Better, lower overhead abstractions require buy-in, and this means it needs to work for other people than the person who wrote them. At some point it needs review and discussion, otherwise it will just be a continual edit war between competing parties.
Might want to look into Github to see all of the many open source projects that are doing code reviews for every PR.