I just got called into my bosses office. Apparently I was too "direct" with one of my code reviews and now the other developer feels put down and demotivated. All I did was point out some areas of the code that could be cleaner and more efficient, if you can't handle that maybe you shouldn't be a developer. If you can't objectly look at your mistakes and learn from them you won't be very useful either.
I am not your mother, I don't care about your feelings!

There is a word for people like that.

I agree that we should point out mistakes so that people can learn and become better. I also agree that we should be able to acknowledge our mistakes. I even agree that co-workers are not friends.

What I don't agree with is that you shouldn't care about their feelings. If you make someone feel bad it will be harder for them to learn. When reviewing someone else's code, you should try to be nice, even when what you're seeing is complete shit. Otherwise your input might be for nothing.

We're all human beings. We all make mistakes and we all have feelings.

Sadly, for people like you it's the reason a lot of "potentially good people" ditch their careers.

Don't get me wrong though, believe me when I say I used to think like you, but then it hit me...and everything changed. You can give feedback without the need of destroying the other one.

Obviously there's a limit, and if after all, they don't get your point, you can start to don't give a flying fuck about whether they understand or not what are they doing wrong.

Those are called "soft skills", and believe it or not, those will help you a lot.

@Nanos Obviously there will always be the "triggered" person that detonates even if you tell them that they forgot a semicolon, or that the indentation is wrong, but I think that's an issue that, in case you're working on a company, must be handled by HR and not by you.

@shellbug 😎