Did my coding lead to colleague's death?

Throwaway account because I don’t want this tied to me.

About eight years ago, I worked at a mid-sized tech company with a senior colleague—let’s call him “Dave.” He was in his early 60s, had decades of experience, and preferred “boring tech” and object-oriented programming. I was more into modern, cloud-native solutions and functional programming, which led to frequent disagreements.

We clashed a lot. Dave thought my approaches were unnecessarily complex, and I thought his ideas were outdated and inflexible. Most of our arguments happened during code reviews, and while things got heated at times, I assumed it was all part of working in a team.

I left the company after a few years. It wasn’t because of him, and I didn’t think much about those conflicts after I moved on.

A few days ago, I got a message from Dave on LinkedIn. He said he’d retired and had been diagnosed with a fast-progressing terminal illness. What stunned me was that he blamed me for it. He said the stress of working with me and dealing with my code had taken a toll on his health, ending the message with, “You shortened my life.”

Before I could respond, his account was deleted. I don’t know if he deactivated it or blocked me, but now I can’t stop replaying everything in my head.

Could I really have caused this? Can work stress lead to something like this? I always thought our arguments were just professional disagreements, but now I’m second-guessing myself. Has anyone else dealt with something like this? What do I even do with this kind of guilt?

> Could I really have caused this? Can work stress lead to something like this?

It can happen, but again some things are just not worth it and life is too short for ridiculous language / code styling debates (which that can be resolved by style guides and automated linting / formatter rules). Health matters much more than that.

You should be better at detecting those who want to waste your time debating this sort of thing in code reviews.

The moment you experience this frequently, just leave.

Your programming did not cause a fast progressing illness.

I will say that code reviews with some individuals have been, by far, the most stressful and demotivating part of my job, and a major reason why I am looking to end a career in developing software in teams, and I would not be surprised if this caused long-term health effects. In some situations, I could feel the blood flow changing in my body, an increased heart beat and blood pressure.

This is especially true in companies with a heavy culture of code reviews, and can be terrifying when a new team member joins and you are waiting for them to reveal what their "code review style" is going to be.

Many times it’s an exhausting “I know my code works, it is fairly robust to the current challenges we are facing, it is well readable and commented, and yet you are shitting on it so much that if we weren’t in a corporate environment I would straight up just tell you to go fuck off”.

In a particular team I worked at Google, it was common to see for fairly small and reasonable PRs (100-500 LOC range including tests) get ~50 or more comments by many people, including extremely opinionated ones (and this was after all the automated linters and code formatters ran, mind you). The irony was that many times the comments left by people were directly at odds with each other (reviewer A: “we should change this variable name from foo to bar” -> code gets edited to bar -> reviewer B: “we should change this variable from bar to foo”).

Conversely, the happiest time in my career was at an early stage startup where the team was so small that each engineer was the full owner and sole developer of a system (one on UI, one on backend system A, one on backend system B) and so we did not enforce any code reviews, we would just informally discuss and review the API surface for integration purposes. Naturally that only lasted until we got to PMF, and then each team was scaled, slowly but surely reintroducing nit-picking code reviews.

Regardless of that, I don't find discussing software engineering topics productive anymore. Whether you go all the way with "boring tech" (php, ansible, mysql) or cool cloud (k8s, go, whatever), it's all the same at the end of the day: we are there to make some CEOs rich.

Take pride of your skills in personal projects.