Oh? Really?
But that has more to do with the attitude of the person being criticised. John Larkin seems to experience any kind of criticism as destructive - he's fishing for compliments and resents it when he doesn't get them.
Sadly, criticism which isn't explicitly critical tends to be ignored. The only test of criticism that matters is whether it's justified, and - in electronics - whether would it lead to a more accurate, faster or more reliable circuit.
Giving information "in an encouraging way" is one of those skills which doesn't actually seem to exist in the real world. "You have done well but you could have done better" isn't something anybody with any sense is going to find flattering.
Not something that I'm in any position to do. I'm on the committee of the local branch of the IEEE but it has never given me any back-channels into any of the places where I've tried to get work.
It doesn't matter how knowledgeable or
I wasn't known as being curt or abrasive at George Kent in Luton, EMI Central Research in Hayes, ITT-Creed in Brighton, Cambridge Instruments in Cambridge, or IASys in Cambridge, or any of the places where I worked in the Netherlands. I wasn't known for being slow to express my opinions either, but there wasn't a lot of friction.
Whatever I was doing worked pretty well for some thirty or forty years. Trying to reconstruct my personality on the basis of the advice of somebody who has never met me face to face wouldn't be all that sensible.