>”Have you thought about this approach" can come across as condcending. Of course I thought about that, it was the first thing I tried before the much more complicated solution that actually works.

This is what I want to hear. Tell me you first considered it and ruled it out because of XYZ. No where am I saying “I think you’re incompetent and I would have done it this way”. On the contrary, I think you’re the right person for the job and I want to hear the assessment of the various other approaches (if any) and why yours fits the bill. It could be as simple as “well, mine does Y, others don’t”. Next time someone asks you about your approach, try not to assume they are trying to belittle you or get you into a “gotcha” situation.

I’m sorry that you had bad managers in the past and are hurt by someone asking about your methods. I genuinely want to know so I can defend the choice to the higher ups on your behalf.

But your example are cases where you feel strong because you have this war story. How about the cases where you just made a mistake?

That said, I never liked the 'sandwhich' method, saying; "Great effort. The result is horrible, like your indentation though."

"war story" is a bit strong, but most of the time I don't go with the obvious solution, there was some investigating done that led to the conclusion that the obvious solution wouldn't work.

The trick is to know who you are talking to. If they did think of your idea, accusing them of having missed it is offensive. If they didn't consider it, asking them to justify their reasoning puts them on the spot.

The value of the sandwich method depends upon some sort of equivalence of the praise. It may have taken hours or days of work to produce the code that generated horrible results, while indentation would likely register as a triviality. To choose a better example: "Your code is great. The results were off, but how you structured it made it easy to isolate the problem."

Overall I agree with your assessment though. People giving this sort of feedback usually focus upon the problem and grasp at straws when it comes to the compliment.

Then you should be glad someone pointed out your mistake, improved the work, and gave you an opportunity to learn. You should be thanking them.

"I see you went with ${solution X}, which is reasonable, though it suffers of ${major downside K} in fairly common ${situation T}. Would ${solution Y} address ${major downside K}? Granted, we are trading off a bit of ${minor downside J}, but at a quick glance appears a solid overall improvement."

That's a good suggestion. It makes clear what the questioner knows and why they asking about an alternative instead of putting the other person on the defensive, trying to guess why the question is being asked.