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?
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
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…
I mean, how have we ended up in such a situation as today, where were have--in our pockets--a computer that would have been considered a supercomputer when I was born, and yet all it does well is make sure advertisers can reach me?
You want to defend the practices of major engineering organizations? Get ready to defend their business practices, too.
Yes, I know I'm coming off as a blowhard. But I think if you really start to look at the technology industry, try to figure out its ills, you start to realize that you can't unpack the good from the bad. That ethics are way out the window, because engineering erroneously sees itself as separate from business. "It doesn't matter that Meta makes it's money off of manipulating users into purchasing decisions, I'm just working on a web app framework". Our engineering jobs would exist without the business unit. Whatever we do, no matter how far removed from the business it is, our jobs wouldn't exist if they didn't count to the bottom line.
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.
As others have pointed out: code reviews exist for many complex projects even outside of these big companies. Code reviews existed before these companies.