I work as a Senior Software Engineer and spend a lot of time thinking about how to foster a more effective culture for my team, specifically for growth and morale.

One little thing that I've encouraged others to do is to be intentional with word choice.

My Opinion

As always, I respect your time, so if you're looking for my quick 2 cents, here ya go!

I think the most effective word choice for fostering growth and creating a positive environment is:

• Use We when providing critique, advice, guidance, etc.
• Use I when discussing the team's shortcomings
• Use You when acknowledging success

The underlying principle I tend to follow is to take blame when things don't go well but share the success when things do. And, when providing guidance and advice, always make sure that the focus is on us as a team, rather than the individual.

A Scenario

Okay, my opinion was all very theoretical and philosophical. What does it look like in practice?

Let's take a code review for an example, as it's commonly a place where all of this happens.

You and your fellow engineers are crunching to release a feature with a deadline in two weeks. Robin, an engineer on your team, sends you their change list.

Using We

You go through this change list and it looks mostly good. You just have some concerns over some class design. You end up commenting with your opinion and have a few options:

• You should split this class up given it's doing too much
• We can split this class up because it's doing too much
• Todo: split this class up; it's doing too much

Obviously, there are more ways to phrase it, but the underlying idea here is that using #2 "We" emphasizes team and collaboration. I also recognize that depending on seniority differences, there are power dynamics at play and would even add "let me know if you disagree, happy to discuss!".

Using I

Some time later, the code is deployed to your production environment and it's catastrophic.

I think the key thing to tap into is empathy. I'm sure Robin is feeling terrible right now and the last thing they need is anything that pushes the blame on them. I think it's an important time to remind Robin that this was a team issue and to shoulder some of the responsibility. Here are two options...

• Your change caused this incident, can you look into it?
• I should've caught this issue in code review, sorry about this!

Using I here really helps to remind Robin that they're part of a team and it is indeed a shared team responsibility, despite them being the developer for the changes.

Using You

A few hours pass and you're both able to identify and hotfix the issue. Everything is smooth again and your dashboards are green. Mistakes happen and we want Robin to focus on moving forward and improving our processes and guardrails, rather than feeling guilty.

While it's perfectly fine to say something along the lines of "good work team!", I think it's an important time to appreciate Robin's efforts in investigating and getting a fix out ASAP. I personally would thank Robin (and anyone else who helped):

Thank you Robin, really appreciate you being so quick to help with that issue.

It's subtle, but helps the team recognize that mistakes happen, and it's more important that Robin stepped up to the plate.

Fin

As always, thanks for reading! If you disagree with something or think I could've articulated something better, please do let me know. I'm happy to chat 🙂

And, if you'd like to stay up-to-date with future issues, create an account and subscribe!