&gt;That&#x27;s exactly what I&#x27;m talking about when I say culture matters. You&#x27;d probably hate being on my team and I&#x27;d probably hate being on yours, even if we are both highly competent devs.<p>This shouldn&#x27;t be a matter of team culture. Socially mature people should be able to adapt their communication to different people&#x27;s personalities without any difficulty. There&#x27;s no reason you can&#x27;t say &quot;Hey Fred, your foo implementation sucks.&quot; in one breath, and &quot;Hey Bob, this bar implementation might be a bit better if you looked into baz.&quot; in the next. And I&#x27;m not sure why you find the latter so unpleasant.