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Agree with everything you said, but there's one aspect you haven't touched well: 4) criticism provokes defensive counter measures, being a very human emotional reaction - being negative and attacking people or ideas or solutions with harsh words will almost never trigger the effects one desires, even when abstaining from attacking the person, since there's always somebody behind the championing of an idea, of a choice or a piece of code. This only works when the people attacked admire you, in which case you end up with point number (2) - making people afraid of trying out anything new. And this happens because people invested time in championing an idea, choosing a certain tool, or writing a piece of code - and now you're coming saying to them that what they did was wrong and the time and effort invested was actually waisted. This is why people tend to get pretty fanatic about their programming languages, or IDEs, or operating systems, or whatever tool they invested a lot of time in - because they want their choice to be the "winner", such that their investment isn't in the end a bad one. The "Paradox of Choice" is very enlightening in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice The culture we've created is one were harsh words are tolerated, even admired and the subject of amusement - I have smiled countless of times whenever I happened to read the rants of Linus Tolvards and the like. On one hand it's good, freedom of expression is good and sometimes it's healthy to name a turd for what it is. But this backfires and especially with these online communications that lack body expression (and the possibility of being slapped), it's turning out to be a rough industry to be in. No wonder women aren't interested. Unfortunately while saying these words, I started thinking of how much of a dick I am sometimes, especially in code reviews. |