Thinking about it again, I think the actual conflation I was getting at is the equivalence of "not being kind" and "being a prick" that you implicate right from

Thinking about it again, I think the actual conflation I was getting at is the equivalence of "not being kind" and "being a prick" that you implicate right from the start. > Kindness Is A Hidden Software Engineering Superpower. Sounds fuzzy and a bit bulls*itty, right? Well, it turns out that if your teammates are pricks, you tend to quit or stay and be unhappy and demotivated. But one is not automatically a prick if one is not kind in the sense you specify later on. Not smiling, not being compassionate, not asking for co-workers' weekends does not make anyone a prick. At least I'd hope so. Therefore, it seems to me that you are writing about two things at once without acknowledging their difference: "Being kind" and "not being a prick". I’d pick one and go with it but not both at once. (As an aside, I became more aware of that difference after watching the series "The Fall" about a Belfast police task force trying to catch a murderer. Some of the characters in the police force (esp. Anderson's) were not kind, but they were not pricks either. They were more or less just doing what was needed to get the job done. It is this series that recently made me aware of how unfashionable this kind of work culture has become in my domain.)