Did my coding lead to colleague's death?

That sounds like a troll posting in his name. So many people out there that revel in causing pain. Particularly the deleted-account trick, so you can't investigate.

As for his colleague - he'd dealt with younger programmers with new ideas before, you weren't the first or only. And, his life was his own - he owned his emotional state, his responses. You were no more responsible for that than a missed bus, or any other perceived slight that he may have dwelt over (if it was him at all that texted you).

Yet all that doesn't help deal with guilt - that's your own to process. Hard, it's not rational or logical - you don't get to explain feelings away, they just are.

I suggest some positive interactions with colleagues could be a benefit to you. Compliment novel approaches, find a positive way to encourage co-workers, notice their sincere efforts. Always start with "That's new to me" or something on that line, instead of being contradictory or argumentative.

You can comfort yourself by taking this bump in the road as something to learn from. Take away something positive. And heck, it also benefits your current colleagues and presents a good example. Who knows where that may lead.

Good luck! I don't think you deserve to haul that stone of guilt around any longer than you need to. It's up to you when you put it down and move on.

More than troll posting it's probably a scam.

Story time: a few years ago I got a call out of the blue from some guy claiming to be a lawyer working for my old company. He named a specific product that I'd built for them a couple years prior and said they're embroiled in this huge lawsuit over it and that I defrauded them, they're coming after me personally for millions in damages, I'll never work in the industry again, etc.

I got off the phone scared shitless, barely slept that night googling my legal liability and searching for lawyers.

Someone I know suggested it might be a prank, so I called the legal team at the company and they had no clue what I was talking about. It was a troll. Never did quite figure out who was behind it, but the moral of the story is people can be mean sometimes and troll you just for kicks.

If they are a troll or a scammer, how would they know about those code reviews? No way they could randomly come up with something so specific.

Setting trolling aside, this could also be an act of a person who is very scared and angry at the diagnosis, and who is dealing with the news by looking for external factors they can blame and redirect their feelings toward. It's a very human reaction for someone in a terrible situation, and I would be inclined to give them some grace for it.

Understanding is not agreeing though. Of course none of this is on you. Everybody deals with stress in their life, and if code review bickering was the worst thing they faced, I'd consider that pretty lucky indeed. As others mentioned, you can't control how others deal with adversity and emotions, and this includes this LinkedIn outburst. No need to feel guilt here whatsoever (though perhaps worth thinking about professional disagreements in general, and ways of handling those conversations in a productive rather than adversarial manner).

It’s not your fault. You didn’t contribute to his death.

How he handled (or neglected) stress in his life may have contributed to his death, but’s that’s on him, not you.

Consider also that he may have psychological issues and/or been looking for a target for his frustrations and you were the most opportune at that moment. I don’t like to throw around the word “toxic” because it’s overused, but it seems to fit the bill here.

I will say that code reviews with some individuals have been, by far, the most stressful and demotivating part of my job, and a major reason why I am looking to end a career in developing software in teams, and I would not be surprised if this caused long-term health effects. In some situations, I could feel the blood flow changing in my body, an increased heart beat and blood pressure.

This is especially true in companies with a heavy culture of code reviews, and can be terrifying when a new team member joins and you are waiting for them to reveal what their "code review style" is going to be.

Many times it’s an exhausting “I know my code works, it is fairly robust to the current challenges we are facing, it is well readable and commented, and yet you are shitting on it so much that if we weren’t in a corporate environment I would straight up just tell you to go fuck off”.

In a particular team I worked at Google, it was common to see for fairly small and reasonable PRs (100-500 LOC range including tests) get ~50 or more comments by many people, including extremely opinionated ones (and this was after all the automated linters and code formatters ran, mind you). The irony was that many times the comments left by people were directly at odds with each other (reviewer A: “we should change this variable name from foo to bar” -> code gets edited to bar -> reviewer B: “we should change this variable from bar to foo”).

Conversely, the happiest time in my career was at an early stage startup where the team was so small that each engineer was the full owner and sole developer of a system (one on UI, one on backend system A, one on backend system B) and so we did not enforce any code reviews, we would just informally discuss and review the API surface for integration purposes. Naturally that only lasted until we got to PMF, and then each team was scaled, slowly but surely reintroducing nit-picking code reviews.

I wonder how many people has all this sh*t cargo culting and nit-picking has sent to grave.

Stress can have an impact on a person's health, but you aren't responsible for how someone deals with work stress. It is also very possible that this would have happened no matter what, and he's just looking for "why" and grasping at straws.

Though I do relate to Dave, being someone who likes boring and simple solutions to business problems, while being pushed into solutions that seem overly complex and stressful for no good reason other than someone's ego and ladder climbing. This does cause me a good deal of stress, but that's on me to find a healthy perspective and ways to deal with it, since I'm not in a position to change the overall situation (short of finding a new job).

Of course you’re not responsible for his death, you need not feel any guilt whatsoever.

However to the general point, having been in this industry for close to 20 years now, unnecessary complexity and constantly changing frameworks and conventions for little to no gain is stressful.

No that is not possible, so far as I know, not in such terms. Attempting to lay that blame on you like that would be stupid and far from professional, assuming that it was not a fake or hijacked account. I cannot imagine that you were his only significant source of stress at work or otherwise.

It is possible that the account was taken over, used to send many such messages, and shut down by LI.

I have clashed badly with some people in work situations, but as long as you acted in good faith, I think that you have no guilt to carry. Certainly don't ruminate on it.

I’ve lost alot of people and have been through my share of shit.

Assuming it’s real, one thing to remember is that you make the decisions and take the actions you took based on the best information available to you at the time. You only control yourself. Your job and duty was to review code and make professional judgments. You did. You did nothing wrong.

If true, and I hope it is a troll, he chose to take professional disputes and make them personal. He chose to get stressed out by your code to the point that he attributes it to his demise. At the end of the day, his inability to behave like a rational, professional adult was his undoing - and then doubled down by cowardly making it your problem, lashing out, then disappearing to hurt you.

Hold your head high. If reflection inspires you to approach things in a different way, do it to improve yourself and align with your values. Don’t let guilt drive your being.

Even if you could somehow tie work stress to causing his illness, it seems unfair to place the blame on you. If it was killing him, why didn't he have the agency to find another job? Why didn't your manager find a way to prevent those conflicts in the first place?

Fear of stress increases the odds of death by 43%. But this only applies to people who think it's bad. People who were under a lot of stress but enjoyed it were least likely to die. People who spent a lot more time caring for others showed no increase in the rate of death from stress related diseases.

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress...

Stress can definitely cause health issues. I don't think code review stress alone is enough. I'm having stress related issues because my TL and I don't agree on many tech topics and he's taking that out on me in performance reviews. Now my job is at risk because some young TL thinks his ways are the only ways.

I would bet my life is shorter after putting up with constant BS from my job. Maybe that's not a bad thing since life in general sucks.

> Could I really have caused this? Can work stress lead to something like this?

It can happen, but again some things are just not worth it and life is too short for ridiculous language / code styling debates (which that can be resolved by style guides and automated linting / formatter rules). Health matters much more than that.

You should be better at detecting those who want to waste your time debating this sort of thing in code reviews.

The moment you experience this frequently, just leave.

You can answer it quantitatively. Look up on Google Scholar how much stress contributes to the illness he has. That's your upper bound. Then reflect on how much stress you have caused him. Multiply and there's your answer.

You can then split your contribution into the necessary (stemming from his inability to handle disagreements) and unnecessary parts (stemming from you being a prick or a bad communicator) to determine how guilty to feel.

(Assuming it's really from them etc.)

If they were this bad at taking responsibility for the stress in their life with regard to you, imagine how bad they were at handling all the other, more basic and visceral, sources of stress they experienced and refused to take ownership over in their life.

They could write a hundred such messages to people they interacted with (and probably did?).

I can remember when object-oriented programming was all the rage and if you didn't see the light you were just too stuck in your ways apparently. I imagine back then Dave may have had some similars arguments with the senior programmers he worked with at the time as you did with him. You didn't cause his terminal illness.

It's funny because I had been the guy pushing OO on everyone thinking they are bad if they don't get it. Now I am serially defeating proposals to use, as the OP puts it, more "modern" solutions, because the young people proposing them are basically me back then. Inexperienced and impressionable.

Regardless of that, I don't find discussing software engineering topics productive anymore. Whether you go all the way with "boring tech" (php, ansible, mysql) or cool cloud (k8s, go, whatever), it's all the same at the end of the day: we are there to make some CEOs rich.

Take pride of your skills in personal projects.

that +1000

> [We clashed a lot]. Dave thought my approaches were unnecessarily complex, and I thought his ideas were outdated and inflexible. Most of our arguments happened during code reviews, and [while things got heated at times, I assumed it was all part of working in a team].

No... "Things got heated" and "We clashed a lot" implies negative emotions. Are you paid for that? If you aren't you shouldn't suffer it.

At a gig a long time ago they were using Pokémon Exception Handing (look it up) everywhere. I pointed out that that was extremely bad practice and showed them sources that explained in detail why it was terrible. They said "We're doing it this way anyway." I said "Fine, but do I have to use it in the code I'm responsible for?" They said "No" and that was that (had they said "Yes" I would have resigned).

You can't change the past and there is no point in feeling guilty for something you didn't do. But for your own sake you might want to change your approach to work-life because it may not be healthy.

One has to take care of his own mental issues. I don't think you should be blamed on anything. If I were in his shoes I'd find another gig quickly.

Can work stress lead to something like this? short answer is yes

long answer is that it probably was not the only factor blah blah blah

Assume the fellow is not well and was lashing out. Any human interactions can cause stress.

Not your fault. Unless you bullied him... but based on this post I doubt that.

This would be (and essentially has been) a good sci fi premise.

Your programming did not cause a fast progressing illness.