WFH

Can you simply ask them to walk through their submission line by line with you, explaining what it’s doing?

This. Code reviews, especially with junior devs, should always be done as a conversation. It’s an opportunity to learn (from both sides), not just a a bunch of “bad implementation. rewrite” thrown in the PR.

There are two types of scrum masters. Those who are true believers in agility, and those who think it’s just a fancy bullshit name for “project manager”. The latter tend to be the the fucking worst, unfortunately they’re the most common breed.

Truth is, a real “scrum master” (or “agile coach” for SAFe 6 people) is at best a part time job, and has only two purposes. With experience and knowledge, help the team towards making their job easier/faster/more interesting/more predictable/more serene through continuous improvement using agile methods as a toolbox (and NOT a fucking dogma), and tell idiotic managers who can’t fucking anticipate a fucking deadline more than 3 days in advance to fuck off and stop being fucking morons teach managers to respect agile principles and have a clear short- and medium-term vision so their needs can comfortably fit the team’s backlog without jeopardizing the team, other priorities or the deadlines.

The other breed are fucking corporate yes-men who shove work over capacity onto the team and play make-believe-scrum by focusing exclusively on bullshit rituals that serve no actual fucking purpose.

Public transport in Europe is often in a sorry state, but trust me, it’s nothing compared to the US. Here in France, a lot of regional trains are very unreliable at best but at least high speed trains on dedicated tracks are fine (very expensive, but ok).

I don’t remember UK rail to be a shitshow and/or that expensive but my only experience is going to/from central London to/from neighboring counties and it was fine.

But in the US, oh boy. About 15 years ago I was living with some roommates in Campbell, CA and we went to SF one day. 1h drive mostly on shitty concrete motorways, including probably around $5 of gas. They were heading north for a romantic getaway so I went back to Campbell by myself. It took almost 4 fuckin hours, on maybe 4 or 5 different private companies, and cost me like $25 to get back.

Public transit in the US is so fucked up im almost convinced it’s by design.