I've worked in two kinds of companies: Places where it's kind of a hassle to get code past a code review, and places where everyone's always having to put out fires all the time.

Of the two, I've had to unexpectedly work nights, weekends or even vacations at only one kind.

Guess which one I decided I'd rather work at.

I don't get it. The two groups are not mutually exclusive.

It can be annoying to go past code reviews and yet there are fire everywhere all the time.

It's very unlikely. Peer-reviews are spreading information across team, so at least two team members are understanding every area of the code, so project manager can always add more members to urgent or problematic task quickly.

I have worked in one place where you couldn't get the code to pass without tests AND a code review.

One of the methods I found had a cyclomatic complexity of 200+ and a single test, verifying that the result was not null.

I was told "no, you can't fix that, the NY office wrote it and they'll get angry with us if we change their code and refuse to help".

Things are worse than you think :)

Depends on how much people care. The code review could be half assed and not detect issues.

IME, those were the same place.

Except the end result was the boss said DO IT NOW and it got done now.

This seems to be a pretty clear example of not making the process work for you. Unwritten policies. Having to escalate twice because of silly reasons. Hot fixes being miscategorized as features. Is a very urgent fix really the place to be fixing a bunch of other tech debt?

cost to business of occasional goof is less here than prohibitively high costs of making any change from these inappropriate and frankly insane processes (I've held management positions at such companies and easily recognise these kind of processes, in fact the post may have triggered some mild PTSD)