How do you handle nitpicky code-reviewers?

At my last place of work I have one coworker who would PR my stuff even when it wasn't assigned to him. He was so passive aggressive it ultimately burnt me out.

He would ripe me apart, mind you I'm a very junior dev, so I check in my code to the best of my abilities and await feedback, I understand that it may not be 100% perfect, but I don't check in shit, I make sure I've tested it thoroughly, it's functional, and it's clean. I mean part of the process is to be learning.

At first when I got his feedback I thought it was brash but I worked through it.

As time went on though it got increasingly hostile. It got the point where I would check-in change he suggested and then he comment for me to essentially revert those changes back to the original functionality that I originally submitted. I remember one time I added validation for user-inputs, so a user couldn't pass a malformed string to DB, he refused to let that into the codebase. Then when I showed him that I could pass null strings to the DB and completely break the app, there was complete radio silence.

In fact he would usually comment on PR in 5-10 minutes with a collection of changes, most of them completely irrelevant to the ticket, there was no mention of these changes in the ticket description, and after implementing all those additional changes that only came up in PR, to the point where he couldn't comment on anything else, he would never, never, never allow me to merge anything. It got to the point where some of my tickets where in code-review for sprint's at a time. I couldn't close out anything because after this fuck gave me so much shit, he wouldn't comment anything, just absolutely nothing. I would bring it up in SCRUM and he would say "Oh, yeah I'll get to reviewing the rest of those changes today" and then he wouldn't, but if there was even something minutely "wrong" with the ticket he would comment within 5-6 minutes after submitting the PR or updated changes.

This was the same guy who decided to not use the API and write raw Mongo queries to interact with the DB "just because", and was the creator of a slack channel called something like "Genius boy".

Ultimately I just found a new job.

/r/cscareerquestions Thread