>Did you notice that "Why didn't you do it this way?" is rather less verbose than your alternative?
"your code sucks" is even more concise. We can take a minute out of our time to elaborate and clarify, and of course not result to insults.
>Managing emotional state should be the responsibility of the listener/reader, while the communicator's job should be to get their idea across as clearly and concisely as possible.
And this mindset is exactly what leads to meltdowns in certain industries. "it's not my fault you feel bad about my abuse". People still want to generally feel like they belong and if all you put out is criticism they will find that belonging elsewhere. You can't be negative 100% of the time and be surprised when morale is down.
It doesn't convey the same meaning at all though. One is a constructive criticism, one is not. Asking about reasoning for discarding alternative solutions is a perfectly standard part of any review process. It doesn't need to be further elongated and stylized to reduce directness.
> "it's not my fault you feel bad about my abuse"
Nowhere in my post did I justify abuse. Ad hominem is generally out of bounds in professional communication. I'm defending a more direct style that communicates the same message, not a difference message all together.
I'm not saying that praise isn't useful feedback, only that it shouldn't be used in place of criticism as the parent post suggested. A submission is either adequate or not, and a review finding a submission inadequate should lay out its reasoning as clearly as possible.
If you're consistently authoring inadequate contributions, the onus is on you to figure out why, and negative emotion is a powerful tool to motivate an individual to do so. The same applies to teams and organizations that fail to meet their objectives. After all these emotions didn't evolve for no reason or in a vacuum.
> People still want to generally feel like they belong
Some people do, some people understand that they're fulfilling a professional function in exchange for compensation and don't see that their feelings have anything to do with it.
The other one is accusatory in tone and puts the user in a defensive position. Even a simple tweak to say "did you consider this approach" is better than a direct "why did you do it this way/not that way"? So I argue the original form leans a bit away from constructive.
> I'm defending a more direct style that communicates the same message, not a difference message all together.
and unfortunately, that direct style has histories of being used to put down. Hence my allegory. Good intentions, but if you can't consider how that language was used by others in less savory ways, you will simply end up the same when you dismiss someone's personal concerns: Tonedeaf.
And here's the assumption that once again comes out of nowhere. Why are we assuming that the hostile employee is right and everyone else is dumb? There are very few cases where these kinds of workers are truly in the right, and those that do tend to have enough emotional intelligence to go on a tirade against every co-worker, as opposed to talking to a manager or director.
Complain up the ladder, not in your immediate radius. I'm assuming we're all competent professionals, so there's almost no reason to ever lash out at a co-worker over their code quality.
>some people understand that they're fulfilling a professional function in exchange for compensation and don't see that their feelings have anything to do with it.
Then they shouldn't care about their co-worker's code quality unless they are constantly asked to fix it. Which is a managerial problem, not a co-worker problem. Same matter applies.
I think you need to revisit the definition. There is nothing accusatory about "Why didn't you do it this way?". It's simple question with a simple answer in the format: "Because <reason>". Reading an accusatory tone from a perfectly neutral question, and then getting defensive about it, is exactly the sort of corporate culture that has no place in a productive environment.
ChatGPT gave the following answer:
> If I encountered the phrase "Why didn't you do it this way?" during a code review, I would likely assume a curious or neutral tone.
To avoid miscommunications, we should all be at least as sane as ChatGPT.
> has histories of being used to put down
The whole point is to interpret the words as they are written, and with common definitions from the dictionary. Not to read tones into them that may not exist in the culture of the speaker.
> assumption that once again comes out of nowhere
I was responding to your quote:
> You can't be negative 100% of the time
If you're receiving 100% negative feedback, the first place I'd look is internally. A review process is a solicitation for criticism. It's you who is saying that a who clearly, directly, professionally, and constructively criticizes work is "hostile".
> Then they shouldn't care about their co-worker's code quality unless they are constantly asked to fix it
They should care when they are asked to review it, since that's the point of a review process.
>I think you need to revisit the definition. There is nothing accusatory about "Why didn't you do it this way?"
okay:
>indicating or suggesting that one believes a person has done something wrong.
I believe the definition is apt here. You believe something is done wrong so you open it up with an accusation of not doing it "this way". It's almost textbook definition. There could be room for context, but in a vacuum it's not best to open up your review with "why didn't you X?". You should have established X while triaging the task.
>ChatGPT gave the following answer:
If there's one thing I'm not going to rely on an AI for, it's for human tone. Even advanced sci-fi sentient android have the stereotype of not capturing tone properly. So there's little point in trusting 2023 web scraping.
It says it's a neutral tone because somewhere in its training data there is a person who assumed a neutral tone. Which in and of itself is subjective. It's based on the AI's limited experience on the internet, and the Internet is also infamously horrible at conveying tone.
back in reality, I've been asked "why" so many times in an accusatory tone IRL that it's always going to put me on the defensive. "Why are you here?", "Why is this not done?", "Why are you late to this meeting?". It's not a good idea in general to do a cold open with that.
>If you're receiving 100% negative feedback, the first place I'd look is internally.
If you get negative feedback from everyone, sure
If you get 100% negative feedback from a few specific persons, then it's probably personal. Especially if those few people are not your direct managers. Something we seem to both agree on is that we shouldn't take things personally in the workplace, but there often is a few people like that no matter where you go.
> You believe something is done wrong so you open it up with an accusation
Nowhere is this belief stated in the text. It's simply not what the words mean. It is being fabricated entirely in your mind. The only appropriate thing to infer from a question is that the asker wants to know the answer.
> I've been asked "why" so many times in an accusatory tone IRL that it's always going to put me on the defensive.
The onus is on you to cope with that. Don't transfer this burden to everyone you communicate with. It's unprofessional.
> If there's one thing I'm not going to rely on an AI for, it's for human tone.
Sentiment analysis is actually something LLMs excel at.
>Nowhere is this belief stated in the text. It's simply not what the words mean.
Why does one ask "why"? There's two primary reason: curiosity and accusation. And generally you're not too curious on what any single worker in day to day work is doing. You may not process it as an accusation, but it can come off that way.
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We seem to not being seeing eye to eye so no point continuing this conversation. Instead of pushing all the blame on me, consider other lenses and experiences and understand why they feel that way. I am very pragmatic and would like to simply assume a question is a question, but that's just not how 90% of questions work when a manager is DM'ing you in chat, or some lead pops into a code review to ask why you made this PR in their module.
Heck, consider this conversation. I give my experiences and you dismiss me and try to prove my experiences wrong with algorithms. Are you really surprised I act defensively when your first instinct is to say my experienced are wrong? Can you see why this may come off as insensitive and foster a hostile environment, an environment where no one cares about your opinions and pushes all blame on you?
Good thing I don't need to tolerate comments like this at work.
I’m with you on this. However, it’s going to take time for those who don’t understand this to understand this. You have to live through it I think. Once you have, you’ll see it immediately. If you haven’t, well, enjoy your direct tone deaf communication style.
Gonna take a lot of time apparently. So much gaslighting in these responses.
I guess I can see why we still have all those "tech is a hostile industry to women/minorities" stuff even in the 2020's. People legitimately think they can talk like Linus Torvald could back in the 90's.But at least Linus was talking to faceless volunteers he had little power over.
>The only appropriate thing to infer from a question is that the asker wants to know the answer.
Categorically incorrect.
Every question comes from either one of two places. Ignorance. Or Vindictiveness.
Let’s explore the latter.
You: driving home after having a great time at your companies happy hour. You finally got to discuss that project you wanted to work on and got a verbal green light.
Cop: “Do you know why I pulled you over?”
In this situation - if the question was indeed ignorance, you respond “going home from work”. You assume it’s ignorance because we genuinely want to believe people are good.
In this situation, the cop is not asking from a place of ignorance, but vindictiveness. He/she believed you broke the law, the next question will prove this…
Cop: “Have you been drinking?”
In my examples above (far far above), “have you thought about X?” Is ignorance. Do you see the difference?
Have you noticed that the people advocating for emotional coddling in this thread also seem to have trouble with nuance? They pose this false dichotomy of "Wow I really love this but..." vs "This sucks go fuck yourself"
Simply being direct and forward without wrapping your words with empty praise or naked insults doesn't seem to be an option they recognize.
'I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.' - Mark Twain
I also notice many people advocating "directness" tend to be bad with words. You may be paid to code, but you're still a professional expected to know how to communicate with peers and everyone else involved. Take time in both your craft and words.
If you can't find the middle-ground between fake smarmy praise and telling people to go fuck themselves, maybe you should check yourself and not go around telling other people they aren't good at communicating.
> In reality, we tend towards one extreme.
This is a personal problem, you should work on improving this.
"your code sucks" is even more concise. We can take a minute out of our time to elaborate and clarify, and of course not result to insults.
>Managing emotional state should be the responsibility of the listener/reader, while the communicator's job should be to get their idea across as clearly and concisely as possible.
And this mindset is exactly what leads to meltdowns in certain industries. "it's not my fault you feel bad about my abuse". People still want to generally feel like they belong and if all you put out is criticism they will find that belonging elsewhere. You can't be negative 100% of the time and be surprised when morale is down.