Am I misunderstanding the basis for Code Review?

Question

I posted a question that seems to have gotten some commentless downvotes.

• Fetching a set of event IDs from a database based on a set of company IDs

Keeping it meta, did I misunderstand something about the intended purpose of Code Review? I suspect having had the word "style" in the question line might have triggered it. But isn't code review specifically for code that actually works, but could be written in a better way wrt. some measure?

I didn't intend for any holy wars here. Not used to the review proces when it doesn't involve some degree of physical contact. I'm also unsure if this is the proper use of a meta, as this is my first meta post.

Answer 1

Your question, as originally written, was marginal for Code Review. As of Rev 6, it is now a fine question.

The problems were:

• Your question had a generic title that did not meet the guidelines in How to Ask a good question.
• You also dumped a bunch of code in the question without explaining what the code is supposed to accomplish.
• As a result, the code you posted could be interpreted as just a hypothetical example. The question was closer to "How do you feel about LINQ in general?" than to "This is my code to accomplish x; how can I improve it?"

Answer 2

To rectify: At the time of writing, the question has 0 / -2. Now let's get into why these downvotes might be there:

1. The question presents two alternatives:

   Believe it or not, I know of users that by principle downvote questions that present two (or even more) approaches to solving the same problem.

   I can somewhat understand them: "What code is up for review exactly now?" and similar are problems in such questions.

2. Open-ended discussion tone and non-determinism of code:

   The question is formulated in a discussion tone "Which is better?", which is bound to get primarily opinion based answers. Instead of a "What can I do better here?", which allows to justify recommendations with facts, standards and similar...

There might be other reasons for downvoting, but I think these two are the main contributors here.

Answer 3

Note: I'm not one of the downvoters.

Your question is at 0/-2, which means nobody thought your question was worthy of an upvote and 2 thought it was worthy of a downvote. That's not good. Why?

Well, the only way to be sure is if they tell themselves. However, downvotes are anonymous and nobody is forced to explain why he or she deemed a certain question/answer downvote-worthy.

For starters, you should probably read our how-to-ask-good-questions meta. Apart from that, the following does not indicate you really want a review:

Is the "less Linq-y" alternative preferrable? [sic]

For one, that's asking for opinions. Stack Exchange sites don't do well with opinion-based questions. Code Review works well as follows:

1. Write code
2. Make sure it works
3. Note it can probably be done better
4. Post it as a question
5. Get helpful answers

So, to answer your question: yes, you may have misinterpreted what we do at Code Review.