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Comment by majestik | Hacker News Reader

These are all just basic principles of being a working professional, if any of this is non-obvious you have a culture problem not a code review problem.

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I'm a manager and you'd be surprised at how many engineers (and people in general) can take issue with wording in communications. And all it takes is one person. More times than not that person is an overachiever - one who wants everyone else to be perfect, or one who wants to always be perfect. So much time is wasted sorting out miscommunication.

Just read through the other comments here regarding feelings for each of the comment types.

Personally I have a thick skin. Even harsh, direct verbal criticism doesn't faze me. I'll laugh in your face and tell you to get the fuck out of mine.

>Personally I have a thick skin. Even harsh, direct verbal criticism doesn't faze me. I'll laugh in your face and tell you to get the fuck out of mine.

I like this attitude. How do you develop this. I am exact opposite of you what you said. I get depressed for the slightest criticism. I want to learn how to develop thick skin. I think it arises from my need to impress everyone around me and my need for their approval.

I see what you're saying, but "I'll laugh in your face and tell you to get the fuck out of mine" is usually a very poor way to respond to criticism in the workplace so you shouldn't necessarily aspire to it.

Unless you're working in a frathouse, it's an incredibly poor way to deal with other people in a workplace.

This rubs many people the wrong way, and you'll quickly find that most of them will not go out of their way to help someone who acts like an asshole. Having people not want to volunteer their assistance to solve your problems is not great for your career trajectory.

I tend to disagree. Solving conflicts with this personality type is often easier because it will stay on topic and you can still share a coffee afterwards.

Many people have been raised in a social environment, where that sort of behavior is considered hostile and disrespectful. If you're laughing in someone's face, they have no idea of whether or not you think their work is shit, or they are shit.

The OP believes that it is not hostile or disrespectful.

If neither group changes their behavior, he's going to be the one who lose out in this exchange. He can feel he is in the right, he may even be in the right, but that's a bit of a questionable hill to die on.

Your value as a human being isn't dependent on your coding ability. It sounds stupid and trite, but it's true. A lot of these types of insecurities arise because we allow things access to our self worth that we shouldn't. Letting other people's opinions affect your core self worth is like giving them root access to your computer and letting them write directly to /

And I think in this analogy having thick skin is kind of like a firewall, it'll keep things out, but it's often just security theatre.

It makes sense to give other people access to your computer. The world is boring as a singleplayer game, but how much access is the right amount? It's worth thinking deeply about where your self worth is stored and who and what in your life has r/w privileges.

Also, this may sound really out there, but if you don't have a good basis for self worth/self love, but if you can figure out the right way to frame it, consider asking your parents or other close friends why they love you. It's a very on the spot kind of question so don't put any value on if they don't answer, but I asked my mom that once when I was in a really dark place(and we don't have a very good relationship) and I was really blown away by her answer to the question. She straightforwardly listed all the positive qualities she admired in me and asking her that was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. It really improved our relationship and probably forever positively impacted my view of myself.

> More times than not that person is an overachiever - one who wants everyone else to be perfect, or one who wants to always be perfect.

This used to be me. For the early stages of my career, I perhaps was the smartest person / best programming in the room, and I definitely thought so. Perhaps because of this, I had very little patience for people who made mistakes I didn't think I would have.

As my career has progressed, I've managed to get jobs where my coworkers are increasingly capable. And truth by told, I've become a little less sharp over time as my brain has aged. Humbling experiences started to pile up.

Only because of those embarrassments did I gain empathy for the limitations / mistakes made by other software developers. And I believe that empathy was what helped me to curb my haughty, critical communication style.

+1 for the wisdom that can come with age. -1 for the pain I caused in others prior to that.

I disagree. Your comment suggest that it's obvious to write this way, while I would argue, if it would be obvious for everyone, you wouldn't even need to write these down.

Also it implies, that it's obvious, and if I didn't knew these rules exist I'm not a professional and may be a cause of a culture problem.

The thing is, most of the examples aren't really rude, they just communicate that the one who wrote the code is doing something wrong, while the reason you do code reviews is to improve the code. But it's not easy to communicate without hurting peoples feelings even when you didn't mean to. Even between cultures there is a lot of difference in how direct you should be and what is considered rude.

It is helpful to have things like these written down, read and discussed even if they seem obvious. Nobody is perfect.

My personal feedback and discussion quality can easily vary depending on circumstances. Also there are many differences in style both preferred and applied. Communication can be very difficult between polar opposites.

Easy to follow guidelines can help with these things.

e: typo

I can see how some of these could be non-obvious for neuroatypicals though. Heck, emotional nuance of written conversation is hard to grasp even for the average person.

I think this requires training/awareness, I don’t think it’s automatically bad culture or bad people.

I had a coworker with aspergers, and he was absolutely fine at code reviews, because he was never even tempted to play the status games that everyone else constantly had to check themselves for. You could really trust his reviews to be about the code and not the person, and he never fell into the trap of trying to prove how smart he was.

I don't know if this is typical, but it shattered some of my preconceptions.

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