There’s no link to the original medium article but I have a feeling the author was female or some other minority in the industry. I might be totally off base with that though. I agree that the wording is very cringy, but if I may offer one defence: I also learned to do this sometimes because otherwise juniors wouldn’t listen to me at all. You had to make them think it was their own idea or they were magnanimously granting you, an idiot (notice how they apologise for being slow), a rename to help your tiny brain understand. Otherwise you’d be stuck in an insane week-long code review with the junior furiously dismissing every single instruction until you looped in a coworker with more social power. I see this article is also by a woman and I’m happy that she’s in an environment where she doesn’t have to do that. I don’t think the other article’s wording is praise-worthy but I do think it’s a somewhat rational adaptation to an environment of hostile coworkers where you need to make yourself submissive to get anything done.