No, actually - right post, but I might not have been specific enough. In particular that: This variable has a generic name, please make it more expressive is

No, actually - right post, but I might not have been specific enough. In particular that: This variable has a generic name, please make it more expressive is an indication you're heading to a PIP and a firing seems to be reading a huge amount of negativity into a comment that isn't warranted. Different cultures and work environments perhaps, but I've often written and received similarly terse statements on code reviews; it's just business as usual. As a rule, I have a huge amount of respect and value my team members - as I hope and believe they do for me. I do often (but not always) use the conditional rather than imperative tense as part of my British cultural baggage; but I doubt most people even consider that. Edit: on further reflection, I think the better relationship I have with the engineer in the code review, the comments get more terse. You can write extremely brief things like "should be private" or "missing type annotation" because you know the baseline working relationship has enough trust and mutual respect to support comments like that without offence.