9fans - fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] XP (was: code complexity)
Date: Wed,  6 Feb 2002 23:04:59 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <200202062304.XAA29702@localhost.localdomain> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Message from Laura Creighton <lac@cd.chalmers.se>  of "Wed, 06 Feb 2002 21:15:18 +0100." <200202062015.VAA03744@boris.cd.chalmers.se>

Laura wrote:
> And it was many, many hours before
> they felt that it was in some way, _permitted_ for them to point out
> flaws in my code.  Finally they got the idea.  And really liked
> savaging their elders for carelessness, and ugliness, and complexity,
> and all sorts of good stuff.  But first they had to know that we
> really wanted to hear this.

I get this problem in prose reviews too. I try to counter it by
explaining to people that I want to hear both what's good and
what's bad: the former, so that I can choose to do it again, and
the latter so that I can choose to avoid it. But in both cases,
it needs to be constructively critical - *why* is it good/bad?

Another tack, which depends on your environment, is to point
out that it's much better for a colleague to point out you've done
something stupid than a (soon-to-be-ex-) customer.

steve




  reply	other threads:[~2002-02-06 23:04 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2002-02-05 17:40 iwanek
2002-02-05 17:49 ` Boyd Roberts
2002-02-06 20:15   ` Laura Creighton
2002-02-06 23:04     ` Steve Kilbane [this message]
2002-02-06  0:10 geoff
2002-02-06 10:42 ` Boyd Roberts

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=200202062304.XAA29702@localhost.localdomain \
    --to=steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk \
    --cc=9fans@cse.psu.edu \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).