Why would you bother giving input when you don't care if or how it is received? Stream of consciousness oversharing isn't required for honesty. You don't have to say everything that comes into your head. Practice giving less of a fuck about everyone else and not evaluating them and telling them how great you are (which is what you achieve when you criticize someone for no reason).

> Why would you bother giving input when you don't care if or how it is received?

Because the point of the statement is in the consequences that result, not the emotional response elicited?

Here's an example, I once worked with an absolutely useless tester, the only tester on my team.

Hadn't picked up by month four on the sort of basic shit he should've had on day one.

And he never did.

I'd been implementing some rather complex features for the technical lead of one of the other teams, and the changes were almost ready to be built.

We had a meeting, with the team lead, my manager, the tester, and I told the team lead that he'd need to test the changes once they were in place.

"[The tester] will do that."

"No he won't, he's not good enough."

Full test coverage mattered more to me than some dude's feelings.

If you had cared about the consequences, it might have served everyone better (yourself included) if you’d found a constructive way to discuss concerns you’d had for months, so everyone involved would have a better chance of success. It’s possible you’d done that, but it sounds very much like you just left a situation in a far from ideal state until you chose to categorically write off a whole person who may not have even known there was an issue to address in the first place.

If full test coverage mattered to you so much, I'd expect at least a part of this anecdote to include some discussion of how it would be handled in light of prior concerns about test coverage up to that point. If I’d been in a leadership role in this scenario I’d probably postpone whatever next thing was on my daily agenda to sit down with you and convey that waiting months to raise known problems is exactly what I expect you not to do. I would indicate that it’s actively harmful to the success of whatever everyone is working on and to everyone working on it, and since you seem to appreciate bluntness I’d add that I expect it not to happen again.

> It was a frustrated outburst regarding something about which I had repeated (and more discretely) commented.

Okay, I’ll grant that my first impression might’ve been wrong.

> And there was no constructive way to address the situation where someone simply is not smart enough to learn their required tasks.

I think maybe there’s something constructive in just separating your assessment of someone’s present skills from your assessment of their person. Have you never found yourself in a position where you didn’t know enough to be proficient and faced a longer and harder climb to meet expectations (your own or external)? How much would it help you improve if you were designated not smart enough, full stop, no path forward?

> Beyond that, just because I can recognise that testing is inadequate, does not mean that I can guide how to do it.

> (Just because I can point when a builder puts a hammer through the glass, does not mean that I can fix the window myself.)

I’m sorry but here I have to call bullshit. You have more informed criteria as a dev about testing than a layperson about construction. You probably have enough familiarity with the system under test to do an adequate job testing it even if you’re not well versed in the broader role of dedicated testing. I’m not saying you were in a position to mentor the tester, or that it was your job to do so. But you were definitely in a position to make more constructive recommendations than blurting out that a person is inadequate.

If I might be more constructive myself, it sounds like you might benefit from becoming more familiar with the testing role you’re evaluating individual competency for. If nothing else it’ll make you a better dev. Maybe you and everyone else will be lucky and you’ll be a little more able to help your teammates succeed, and know how to fill in gaps so you can succeed too.

You're literally telling us about an incident where you were not proficient and don't even recognize the skills you would need to develop to have handled it better. The other version of this story is "yea I had this dev, did fine as a developer so long as you just babysat him through every interaction with someone else. Like, one time he just told this other engineering manager that he would have to do the testing on a project because this dev guy didn't know how to test stuff and he didn't think the assigned tester was any good at his job - and he'd just been sitting on this clusterfuck for months! I learned I had to just coax him into actually telling me about anything that wasn't literally written in an IDE. God, talk about exhausting. He didn't need a manager, he needed a social skills teacher."

And you're using this incident as an example of why social skills don't matter....

> And there was no constructive way to address the situation where someone simply is not smart enough to learn their required tasks.

Of course there is man. Nobody is smart or dumb, they are just curious or incurious. You could have pointed out what was lacking in their knowledge base, pointed to documentation, pointed to inadequacies in the process etc. Just shouting at someone's face that they are good enough was the worst way to tell this truth.

Well, I wasn't there, but I'm more inclined to believe that he wasn't given the support and mentorship he needed to learn than that he was simply "bad" and incapable of growing into the role. Maybe your organization wasn't in a position to provide that and it was a bad match, it happens.

If you decide this dude isn't gunnuh make it and start cutting him off projects rather than getting him more support, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And it's pretty messed up to trash him that way.

If I'm being perfectly frank, this doesn't so much sound like a case where brutal honesty saved a project than a case where you lacked the tact and emotional intelligence to navigate a delicate situation (or perhaps were frazzled by a complex project with deadlines where you felt your colleague wasn't carrying their weight), and so you just took a sledge hammer to it.

That's such a brutal way to treat a colleague, it must have been devastating for their moral. Like, what was your relationship to this person like after that? Did they stay on? Were your team lead and manager really okay with how you handled that?

The guy simply did not have the ability to think in useful abstract terms.

He would ask about something that I expected him to be able to figure out, I would answer. Then he ask the same question with different parameters.

Day after day, week after week, month after month.

So yeah, the truth fell out of my mouth. It's always harshest when it's actually true.

An emotional response is part of the consequences. That’s the objective reality that everyone else knows. Either you do know and are kidding yourself, or you don’t know and people have worked around you or sidelined you, or maaaaaaybe you’re that one brilliant jerk everyone believes themselves to be.

In this example you’re basically just dodging the question, because talking to someone is different than talking about them to someone else. I can’t tell if you genuinely don’t understand this.