I’d like to find a better way to phrase "why aren’t you . . . " questions. It carries an accusatory tone in text, even if you don’t intend that. The answer is almost invariably going to be either “I didn’t know it existed” or “because reason X”. Neither case justifies the accusatory tone. Maybe if the “I didn’t know it existed” answer was something so basic that they really should have known it existed, but probably not even then.
My preferred variation of this is to make it an open question that leaves them in the position of authority, and assumes that they made a deliberate decision.
For example, instead of “Why aren’t you using StandardLib that does 90% of this?”, I would try “Could this be achieved with StandardLib? Seems like it would cover 90% of this”.
If you have seniority and they are a junior, some juniors do respond well to a senior having more knowledge about the codebase. With them, it can be beneficial to use a tone like “We have library X that seems like it could do a lot of the functionality here, unless you already took a look?” I know it’s like 90% of the same but I know people who will just be shellshocked and just blindly say “yes” to any question you ask them, and I don’t want a blind “yes” I wanna know the truth :) it also lets then explain why they didn’t use it if they have a legit reason because hey, maybe I’m the one who needs to be caught up
I have either written or gotten a variant of every single one of these comments 🫠:
Please include the JIRA task in the commit title.
Did you run any manual testing?
Where’s the PRD link in the commit message?
Can you please split this into multiple smaller commits?
Can you combine these two commits?
Did you email Jon about this because he’s working on that project with Sarah and you might be duplicating efforts.
This should be named BarFoo instead of FooBar.
Why aren’t you using CorporateInternalLib16 that does 90% of this?
Why aren’t you using ThirdPartyPaidLibByExEmployee?
Why aren’t you using StandardLib thing you forgot existed?
All our I/O should be async.
All our hot loop code needs to be sync.
This will increase latency of NonCoreBusinessFlow by 0.01%. can you shave some time off so we can push in feature B also?
Please add a feature flag so we can do gradual rollout.
What operational levers does this have?
Lgtm - just address those comments
I dunno, plenty of those sound pretty reasonable.
Mostly, yes.
I’d like to find a better way to phrase "why aren’t you . . . " questions. It carries an accusatory tone in text, even if you don’t intend that. The answer is almost invariably going to be either “I didn’t know it existed” or “because reason X”. Neither case justifies the accusatory tone. Maybe if the “I didn’t know it existed” answer was something so basic that they really should have known it existed, but probably not even then.
My preferred variation of this is to make it an open question that leaves them in the position of authority, and assumes that they made a deliberate decision.
For example, instead of “Why aren’t you using StandardLib that does 90% of this?”, I would try “Could this be achieved with StandardLib? Seems like it would cover 90% of this”.
If you have seniority and they are a junior, some juniors do respond well to a senior having more knowledge about the codebase. With them, it can be beneficial to use a tone like “We have library X that seems like it could do a lot of the functionality here, unless you already took a look?” I know it’s like 90% of the same but I know people who will just be shellshocked and just blindly say “yes” to any question you ask them, and I don’t want a blind “yes” I wanna know the truth :) it also lets then explain why they didn’t use it if they have a legit reason because hey, maybe I’m the one who needs to be caught up