Well no one actually asked you for a review, it's just a stupid checkbox item some boomer added to the list of other useless checkbox items - like group calls where everyone is just reading list of closed tickets we can all read ourselves in jira. This self righteous bullshit makes the whole ordeal even more insufferable.
Code reviews are one of the few ordeals worth doing. They catch problems and transfer knowledge. In a reasonably well run org (it doesn't take much) code reviews are easily a huge net benefit.
As for "reading closed tickets", you are right. It is silly. Alas, in apathetic orgs it is a reliable way to get some people know what is going on some of the time. And that particular ordeal keeps the tickets somewhat in sync with reality.
Consider that your experience may not be universal. Just because your reviews are useless rubber stamps to satisfy "some boomer" does not mean that other shops also have no standards. I get explicitly asked for reviews at work all the time, and I'm expected to actually understand the code and provide useful feedback.
By the way, you don't have to give useless reviews even if your coworkers do. It sounds like your workplace is infected with complacency, but there's no law that says you can't do better.
If you saw the nonsense some of my teammates try to commit, you would have a completely different view on code review. Just off the top of my head in the past 3 months, they have:
- Written a 1-line function that returns a literal, but they pointlessly made the function async and added a @cache decorator.
- Used try/catch to catch ALL exceptions, and then just ignored the exception causing code elsewhere to explode.
- Used try/catch to catch ALL exceptions, and then log that an authentication error happened. Did the request time out? Well the logs now lie to you and say it was an authentication error.
- Replace a log statement for a very serious error with a logging.warning() because that makes the error no longer show up on our reports.
If code reviews are that useless to you, that must mean either your team is completely homogeneous in terms of skill level and knowledge, or no one is taking the code reviews seriously.
