As someone who has been programming for 10+ years...
"Version control (revision control? WTF is that?)" You don't know what version control is? Or are you trying to start a worthless pedantic debate on terminology?
"How do you make a mess of version control other than just not checking stuff in?" That depends on the source control system, but they all have certain conventions/workflows you have to follow else you screw things up.
"Code reviews are pretty fucking stupid, IMO." There's not much of any other way to ensure code quality. If they wrote their own tests, the test could not feel out corner cases, security, reasonable efficiency, etc. Things QA would probably not catch. That action method on a controller that doesn't have a permission check and exposes sensitive data. You can point fingers and say QA's job to test for that, but even if you were right, you still wrote it wrong in the first place and someone has to touch it again. Code reviews give people an incentive to do it right the first time, and if it's not right, at least they will be fixing it while it's fresh on their mind and they can learn from their mistakes. Lots of shit coders write shit code and it works 9 times out of 10. Overtime you rack up a long list of bugs and instead of coddling it along with band aids and duct tape, you finally tear it all out and redo it. So in the end it's not worth paying people to write shit code. It's very much like the contractor who has to tear out a shit job and make someone redo it right. No point in paying someone to write code that someone else will have to tear out and rewrite later.
On the other hand, I like having my code reviewed. Rarely there is a slip up, maybe I didn't handle a transaction perfectly or think about a certain corner case. Sure it tested fine, but there would have been a race condition at some point down the line that would have slowly accumulated bad data each time it happened. Much better that someone else catch it now before it goes to production and causes some difficult to track down bug that is difficult to reproduce and causes people to have to spend a time fixing bad data.