Was the startup successful? :)

Actually no, and IMHO a significant contribution to that failure was that they had bred a culture of cheating where developers would bypass these controls. For example, one of the managers would get his brother to approve his changes, and vice-versa, even if the code was total gibberish.

Generally, the lesson I took away from that place is that you can blow $10 million in seed money and end up with worthless code if you don't pay attention to the basics. They were in the right market, at the right time, with the right product, and 3-5 years ahead of the competition, but you can't sell non-functioning software.

My favourite example (of many) was that they used a source control system that could cache Java ".class" files to enable incremental compilation at all times, even without IDE support. This was literally a check-box that someone un-ticked years before I got there. I re-enabled it for myself as a local setting override and compile times went from 30 minutes to 5 seconds. That inner-loop speed-up was just insane, I could fix bugs in minutes that would take the rest of the team days.

Speaking of code review, the code that I saw getting "rubber-stamped" was so bad it was unbelievable. One guy spent months working on multi-threaded animation code that I replaced with a single line of code. Which actually worked, didn't stutter, and didn't leak threads, or use threading at all for that matter.

The essentials matter! Proper code review, well set up tooling, hygienic build pipelines, etc...

Sounds to me that the real takeaway is that the essentials you list don't, in fact, matter if you have incompetent developers.

well certainly if you have incompetent developers in senior management, but is that a surprise to anyone? I don't think a good git workflow or whatever could ever fix something like that

To me, code review is a tool that can make incompetence a temporary condition.

People have to be open to constructive feedback and want to grow, however.

Having a code review policy is like having speed limit signs on the motorway.

Without enforcement, you can make the argument that speed limits don’t save lives because everyone drives as fast as they can anyway.

Same thing for code review. If it’s not policed by management, then it does nothing.

I saw one place that would send alert emails if a commit was approved too fast, assuming that someone must have had it insta-approved by a friend as a favour.