[swift532]

To be frank, those hypothetical answers seem very hostile and I wouldn't want to work in an environment where communication works this way.

Instead of saying "of course there would be" there could be a bit of a deeper discussion and the two people could figure out the best solution together. It's always supposed to be people against a problem, not people against people.

[wccrawford]

Yeah, all of their answers show that they never intended to take any advice.

If they were a junior developer here, they wouldn't make it to 3 months. If they were a mid-level developer, they'd get talked to about their attitude, and if they continued to be hostile, I'm pretty sure they'd be let go. It'd be a harder decision if they were passively hostile instead of overtly, actively hostile like those comments, but I think it'd show clearly enough anyhow.

The company here cares so much about the culture that my morning "standups" actually turned into hour-long random discussions daily, and management would walk by and say nothing, unless there was an emergency happening. (Thankfully seldom.) When one of us went remote, that turned into a video chat and they even wanted to schedule a second one in the afternoon, but we were all against it.

Toxic answers like the ones above could ruin that culture from someone with tenure, and we'd never let a novice with that attitude get far enough to affect things.

As for myself, I'm not as soft as the original questions, but I do soften my critiques. I'm honest about what I'm thinking about their code, and give my thoughts as to how it could be improved. When I think it won't actually cause a bug, I let them decide whether to take my advice or not, and most of the time they don't rewrite the code. (And often later find out that it was a mistake, but that might be years later.) Or it might not be a mistake. :D

[jodrellblank]

I wouldn't reply in that way in a workplace, they're exaggerated to illustrate the trolling nature of the questions. Picking arbitrary things and demanding that someone explain them to you is what narcissistic parents and horrible film drill sergeants do - what they are doing is power-tripping and keeping you uncomfortable.

It looks polite because they aren't using swear words, but you can tell there's something up when the original commenters wants to go and give this advice "in private" "for your own good". That's not right. Private is for "your work is all over the place and you are distracted, is there anything I can help with?". It's not for "SSHD handles login failures much more sanely than BLUB". There's nothing about that which needs to be critical or secretive.

Giving well-meaning advice would be something like "Many times when I brought in new tools turned to regret when other people had to deal with them during outages, and when I see BLUB used instead of SSHD it makes me nervous. All N people will have to take time to learn it to integrate it properly with the team, so I strongly recommend unexciting and familiar tools by default; but individual situations are unique and I don't know BLUB well - what is its strength, and does it add enough that we might consider moving everything to it?"

That is - advise what to do ("use unexciting tools"), explain why (backstory with consequences of not following advice in the past), explain who it affects (coworkers in stressful times), share less-obvious concerns (cost of everyone having to learn it), and be open to new information (maybe their plan can add a lot of value).

> and we'd never let a novice with that attitude get far enough to affect things.

A child would never have the power to talk back to power-tripping adult, but an equal adult would. "I want to stop you and interrogate you about some random thing I've noticed without explaining why I want to do that", "Well you can't, I'm busy. Stop power playing and trying to imply you know things and making me beg for them; if you have advice which improves the product, give that advice to everyone."