From one of my favorite blog ranters, Ted Dziuba on the maddening prevalence of non-blaming language in the workplace.
Yesterday, I spearheaded a new movement at the office. I stopped using the word “we”, and started to say what I really meant to say. For example, instead of “We should fix that bug”, I say, “You should fix that bug”, and good God is it satisfying.
… Why not just tell it like it is?
When I worked at Google, I picked up on a really annoying trend in the software industry (or maybe just in Silicon Valley) that I call “fuck-you with a smile”. You never want to outright blame somebody or something, rather, it’s best to state the existence of an issue and then ask “the team” to fix it. We should really move that icon ten pixels to the left. We definitely need to fix that concurrency bug. We should probably have that all done before lunch.
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