I use a coaching approach for new hires at my startups.
It’s important to be consistent with your online voice though. If you’re always blunt and terse then, generally, people won’t take it badly. But if you slide between extraneous gestures and out right profanity then eventually someone will take it personally.
I'll set aside the fallacious premise that everybody can stack their team with 10x engineers. Some of us actually work with interns and juniors.
That being said, your comment doesn't invalidate the need for a better review system. Software quality isn't defined by any one tool or process; the product is the end result of a chain of tools and processes...
And I've coded with (and hired) interns and juniors, so it's not just a selection effect. In fact, the worst code I've seen came from a senior engineer, with strong opinions, who wrote the world's most blecherous code. We fired him, but not soon enough.
I don't want to enter the people vs. systems debate but certainly a good system can help.
1. You've been working on some non-trivial change for long enough that you find some element of it trivial and not worth documenting, but others have no idea why it's there.
2. You've been looking at something so long that a "temporary code, I'll fix it later" starts looking natural and it takes someone else to call it out.
