I recently read the book "How to Win Friends & Influence People", bad title great book. My main take away from this is I've been talking to people really badly for the last 27 years. I wish I had read this book in middle school.
But this blog reminded me of some of the concepts from the book, its far more productive to give positive encouragement than to give negative feedback, and just adding a complement isn't enough if you follow it with a "but".
"Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start. I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work"
will get better results then this
"Hey pretty cool program, but you're reading in files wrong"
which even that is better than this
"You're reading in files completely wrong, try googling for a better solution" which unfortunately among engineers seems to be the most common reply.
But this blog reminded me of some of the concepts from the book, its far more productive to give positive encouragement than to give negative feedback, and just adding a complement isn't enough if you follow it with a "but".
"Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start. I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work"
will get better results then this
"Hey pretty cool program, but you're reading in files wrong"
which even that is better than this
"You're reading in files completely wrong, try googling for a better solution" which unfortunately among engineers seems to be the most common reply.