Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

A PR I raised was left un-reviewed for 3 months. And finally when shit hit the fan, I was asked why I never worked on the fix.

I pointed to the PR I raised 3 months ago and I got absolutely flamed for it because obviously, it was my fault that I did my part, asked for a review and moved on to other tasks.

According to my manager, I should have kept pushing for the PR to be reviewed.

I wanted to set the office on fire that day.

Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.

App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.

Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.

Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.

I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).

He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.

Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.

Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.

After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.

Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.

I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.

Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.

I've created a code review for merging someone else's code, coz they were signed off sick for the last month.

They're making comments about how it's wrong.

It's code they wrote, but restructured to be more readable.

They wrote incorrect code that was just so illegible they didn't realise.

How do I explain this diplomatically?

A former team lead decided the team should review any open PR before proceeding with their own tasks after their breaks. Any open PR also meant reviewing refinements in an ongoing discussion. Several times, we wasted time for review, coding, and discussing when the second reviewer asked to revert the changes introduced according to the requests of the first reviewer.

Now as a freelancer, in smaller projects, I sometimes have no coworkers to review my code. So, apart from testing, I try to pay more attention to linters, static code analysis and automated coding assistance. I have stylelint, eslint, SonarLint, and possibly some more IDE inspections. For the infamous popular blogging software, I also have a so-called PHP code sniffer that checks all PHP and JavaScript code for compliance with the WordPress coding styles, so finally, I got the team experience back: SonarLint suggests removing unnecessary spaces and reformating my code, which in turn makes PHPCS complain that the code violates the legacy code style.

Log() method blocking caller to

1) Enter a critical section
2) Open the log file
3) Move to the end of the file
4) Write the log
5) Close the log file
6) Exit the critical section

And this was already in production.

Submitted some message processing thing..I thought it was ok but got 67 comments from the hot shot dev who decided to drill it a new one…about 50 were valid to be fair…a chastening experience:)