No, actually - right post, but I might not have been specific enough. In particular that:

This variable has a generic name, please make it more expressive

is an indication you're heading to a PIP and a firing seems to be reading a huge amount of negativity into a comment that isn't warranted.

Different cultures and work environments perhaps, but I've often written and received similarly terse statements on code reviews; it's just business as usual. As a rule, I have a huge amount of respect and value my team members - as I hope and believe they do for me. I do often (but not always) use the conditional rather than imperative tense as part of my British cultural baggage; but I doubt most people even consider that.

Edit: on further reflection, I think the better relationship I have with the engineer in the code review, the comments get more terse. You can write extremely brief things like "should be private" or "missing type annotation" because you know the baseline working relationship has enough trust and mutual respect to support comments like that without offence.

That's... self-contradictory. Your edit is in complete agreement with me.

Baseline working relationship has trust and respect: "should be private"

Otherwise: "This is supposed to be encapsulated. Please make this variable private."

Stilted, formal, directive language is not a hallmark of a healthy working relationship, and the number of replies to my comment here that seem to take the opposite position... is not encouraging.

No, your post comes across as sarcastic. “Please rename a variable” is in no way an indicator that you are borderline being PIPed.

Additionally, that’s not even scratching the surface for HR documentation that is required for underperformance. It needs to be blatant “you are not meeting expectations” phrasing.