Tell me about a time you disagreed with a code review comment.
- Technology:
- Behavioral
Quick answer
Show that you can defend a technical decision with evidence while remaining open to a better argument.
What the interviewer is evaluating
- Technical communication
- Collaboration
- Humility
How to structure your answer (STAR)
- Situation: review disagreement.
- Task: resolve it.
- Action: clarify and provide evidence.
- Result: decision and learning.
Example answer
A reviewer suggested replacing a small abstraction with a shared utility. I initially disagreed because the utility would have introduced more coupling.
I asked what duplication concern they were seeing and compared both versions with the expected future use cases.
We kept the local implementation for that feature and agreed on a utility only if the second use case appeared. The discussion helped us avoid premature reuse.
Discussion
Code review is collaborative engineering, not a contest of authority.
Explain the concern behind the comment before explaining your position. A strong answer may end with you changing your implementation.
If the disagreement remained, describe how you used project conventions, documentation, tests or a short experiment to resolve it.
Key points
- Understand the concern
- Use evidence
- Stay respectful
- Accept better reasoning
Common mistakes
- Treating comments as personal criticism.
- Ignoring valid reviewer concerns.
- Escalating a small disagreement unnecessarily.
Follow-up questions
- Have you ever changed your code because of review feedback?
- What if the discussion could not be resolved?