A Million Lines of Bad Code
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.<p>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".<p>"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"<p>will get better results then this<p>"Hey pretty cool program, but you're reading in files wrong"<p>which even that is better than this<p>"You're reading in files completely wrong, try googling for a better solution" which unfortunately among engineers seems to be the most common reply.