>Allowing anyone to promote anything to production without any other eyes on it is problematic.

In my experience the people who are promoting things to production that shouldn't be will find a way to do it. They'll either wear down the people who want to stop it, or they'll find someone else to approve it who doesn't know why it shouldn't be approved or doesn't care.

My hypothesis is that requiring any 2nd random engineer in the company to approve production code doesn't provide enough value to justify the cost.

There may be other controls that are worth the cost.

However, our industry has been shipping software for a long time without this requirement, and I've seen no evidence that the practice has saved money, reduced the number of bugs, or improved software quality by any other metric. I think it's time we examine the practice instead of taking it on faith that it's a net benefit.

>Not realizing this is extremely telling.

Nice way of saying, I don't agree with you so I must be an idiot.

but there isn't actually a second set of eyes because the second set of eyes you're thinking about is complaining about formatting or slamming the approve button without actually looking