Programming

I've seen variations of this opinion a lot in tech, but you don't have to sacrifice frank feedback to be a little more polite. Like sure "this code is dumb" is better than "you are dumb", but not as good as "this could be more efficient if we did y instead"

The latter is more helpful and less confrontational. The best devs I've worked with have been excited about code, and that came through in review. When they saw something that was wrong their feedback came across as excited to share rather than affronted by ignorance.

The thing devs don't like to admit is that a ton of stuff we argue about is more taste than science. There's no right answer to the classic performance vs readability thing, or where exactly the line is for effort vs payoff. Couching feedback around things like that a opinion often makes people way more receptive to it. "Hey I'd prefer if we did it this way" often goes a long way, IMO.