I came up with it trying to think of something vicious that contained absolutely no insight about how to be better. It doesn't actually have any information about what the bad mistakes might be. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole idea that that'd work for some people.
Well, a real-life example would contain both disrespect and information about the mistakes, and how to do better. Something more like, 'How could you possibly be so stupid as to use the same memory location to store the car's current radio station and the desired fuel-injection rate, controlled only by a flag in another piece of memory? Didn't it occur to you that someone working on the entertainment system code might never even think of checking for a flag related to speed & safety? Dear God, Smith, do you realise how many people you could have killed? I can only hope that your other mistakes have prevented idiots like you from being born and placed into positions of trust, you sorry misbegotten excuse for an engineer!'
Harsh, but I bet Smith would remember that moment well, and be more careful in the future. Or he might quit, and never write automotive-safety-impacting code again.
Which is, I think, a mistake; by and large, the best of harsh feedback is more 'both' than 'either/or' - i.e. it might include a fair chunk of yelling but there's also actionable criticism therein. Certainly if you look at Linus' rants the ranting is to emphasise the criticism, not to act as a substitute for insight.
