Source: The Pragmatic Engineer
Code review—ostensibly a quality gate—has become a productivity bottleneck. Senior engineers already stretched thin spend disproportionate time on approvals. The cost compounds: bloated review processes either slow shipping velocity or get circumvented through approval theater, eroding the quality cultures that retain talent. Companies that optimize for review rigor without investing in tooling, async workflows, or reviewer capacity lose their best engineers to competitors with leaner processes.