Lots of good advice. However, I feel that in recent years a certain kind of professionalism is in decline that I begin to miss. It is the culture of professionalism in which personal care is not being conflated with professional care. This article is partly engaging in this conflation.

Caring about co-worker's weekends and "rudeness, bullying, demeaning comments, and insults" are not values on the same dimension. Neither are "compassionate" and "critical" code reviews. I do not want people to see me on a slope leading to misconduct just because I don't care about their weekends or show compassion in my code reviews. I really wished that these things were kept apart.

Great point, thanks for bringing it up! True, I wasn't detailed on this point in the article, but I do agree with what you wrote - it's not either-or, there's good kind of criticism, too. I think I'll think about it a bit and rephrase that point. How would you talk about this?

Thinking about it again, I think the actual conflation I was getting at is the equivalence of "not being kind" and "being a prick" that you implicate right from the start.

> Kindness Is A Hidden Software Engineering Superpower. Sounds fuzzy and a bit bulls*itty, right? Well, it turns out that if your teammates are pricks, you tend to quit or stay and be unhappy and demotivated.

But one is not automatically a prick if one is not kind in the sense you specify later on. Not smiling, not being compassionate, not asking for co-workers' weekends does not make anyone a prick. At least I'd hope so.

Therefore, it seems to me that you are writing about two things at once without acknowledging their difference: "Being kind" and "not being a prick". I’d pick one and go with it but not both at once.

(As an aside, I became more aware of that difference after watching the series "The Fall" about a Belfast police task force trying to catch a murderer. Some of the characters in the police force (esp. Anderson's) were not kind, but they were not pricks either. They were more or less just doing what was needed to get the job done. It is this series that recently made me aware of how unfashionable this kind of work culture has become in my domain.)

Not only that, but throughout the years I've noticed people in that field tend to either develop on the kindness vector or going the bitter, snarky road. Great article!