A while ago at a past job, I was working on OpenERP (now called Odoo I think). This "community" had instated this kind of "mandatory community review" policy so that each change had to be reviewed by X developers from other organizations. I kind of virtuous web of review.

But the thing is: this code is terrible and huge chunks of it are a unholy mix and match of code written for very specific purpose for this or that client, with this very weird "falsely generalized" code. I don't know how to call that: you have some very specific code, but you insert useless and probably buggy indirections everywhere so that it can be considered "general". The worst kind of code.

Anyways, I was asked by my boss to do such a review. I look at it and I realize that building a database setup to be able to properly run that code is going to take me weeks because I'm going to have to familiarize myself with tons and tons of modules I don't know about.

So I write down my estimate in our tracker: 1 month.

He comes back to me, alarmed. A whole month? Well yeah, otherwise I can't even run the code.

All you have to do is look at the code! What? No way, that ain't a review. Well, I ask you to do it as such. I'm not writing LGTM there.

So I was never asked to do reviews there again (in fact, I stopped working on OpenERP at all), but I could see "LGTM" popping up from my colleagues. By the way, on OpenERP tracker, all you ever saw in review logs was "LGTM" and minor style suggestions. Nothing else. What a farce.

So yeah, as the article says, there are some "LGTM-inducing" type of PRs, but the core of the problem is developers accepting to do this "LGTM-stamping" in the first place. Without them, there would only be reviewable PRs.