A must read, not just for engineers, but across the board (in my experience), and useful for managers. Tone, passive aggression, and dismissiveness are big ones I see within teams on my end, as well as within the academic community, partly engrained in the culture. Often gendered and often unintentional, these behaviors are  not an acceptable way of operating, especially when it causes discomfort or disengagement across a team.

On “being kind”:

“I thought my job was to be right. I thought that was how I proved my worth to the company. But that was all wrong. My job was to get things done and doing anything meaningful past a certain point requires more than one person. If you are right but nobody wants to work with you, then how valuable are you really? How much can you realistically expect to accomplish on your own? I was “winning” my way out of a job one argument at a time.

I headed home early that day to think about what I had heard. My future wife April was gentle but she offered me little reprieve from the feedback: “If you want people to work with you, you need to be kind.”

[…[

Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.”