How to tactfully respond to compliments when I don't feel I deserve them?

Question

I'm the most senior developer on my current team, and I often get asked for help by my teammates. Sometimes when they ask for help, it's with something that I think is fairly obvious or easy to do. When I help them, I get some sort of compliment, but I don't know how to properly respond to it.

Here's a recent example of a conversation I had over slack with one of my teammates.

Teammate: I need to make this api call with the user id to get data for the modal, but the call is happening before the ID is set

Me: You could wait to make the api call until you open the modal instead of when the page is loaded. You could also use an observable so that your api call won't happen until the ID is set

Teammate: I never would have thought of that. You're so smart

The solution to the teammate's problem seemed really obvious to me because I've been writing code for several years. I realize that the solutions aren't obvious to others (or else they wouldn't need to ask me), but I don't feel that a compliment such as "You're so smart" is really necessary.

I want to acknowledge the compliment, but I don't want to accidentally insult the other person when I do so. For compliments like this I usually thank the person. Then I always feel the need to offer an alternative reason for my knowledge. In this particular case I said that I just have a lot of experience. I fear that my response could be seen as dismissive and/or rude.

How can I tactfully acknowledge these kinds of compliments without being rude to the other person?

Answer 1

I have good news for you, according to research done at the University of Minnesota, it's not the American way to accept a compliment. In fact,

Americans rarely accept compliments. Deflecting or rejecting compliments negates the implication that the addressee is superior to the speaker in any way. In American English, the preference of response strategies other than acceptance may be related to the notion of democracy and equality of all human beings

In addition, they give 5 common "Response Strategies" (you can find percentages for how often each was found to be used here):

1. Accept

   • Appreciation Token (Thanks/Thank you)*
   • Comment Acceptance (Yeah, it’s my favorite, too)*
   • Praise Upgrade (Really brings out the blue in my eyes, doesn’t it?)**

2. Mitigate

   • Comment History (I bought it for the trip to Arizona)**
   • Shift credit (My brother gave it to me/It really knitted itself)**
   • Questioning or Request Reassurance/Repetition (Do you really like them?)*
   • Return (So’s yours)**
   • Scale Down/Downgrade (It’s really quite old)**

3. Reject

   • Disagreeing Utterance (A: You look good and healthy. B: I feel fat)*

4. No Response^**

5. Request Interpretation^**

   • Addressee interprets the compliment as a request: (You wanna borrow this one too?)

^{Above passages adapted from *Nelson, Al-Batal, & Echols (1996), p.419 and **Herbert, 1990, p. 208 [©].}

In your case, Requesting Interpretation doesn't really make sense and No Response would be incredibly rude. This leaves us with three main categories. You've said you don't feel you deserve the compliment, so I think we can safely cross off Accept. That just leaves Mitigation and Rejection.

Personally, I'm not a fan of Rejection except with close friends. From the way it's described in the article, it feels a little too strong for me. But for the different Mitigation techniques, your response may look like:

2. Mitigate
   • Comment History
     • "I had to learn that one the hard way when I was struggling to XYZ."
   • Shift credit
     • "It just looks that way now. Once you've had a few more years as a developer, you'll be the one helping me!"
   • Questioning or Request Reassurance/Repetition
     • "Really? I think you would've gotten it with a little more tinkering."
   • Return
     • "Not as smart as you when you solved that issue with ABC last week. Me and Gina from accounting are still talking about how awesome that was."
   • Scale Down/Downgrade
     • I would not suggest this as downgrading the feat will indirectly be putting them down (they'll be thinking if it was so easy, then why couldn't they do it?)

However, while this may handle the body of your response, in my experience it's always good form to lead with a "thank you" or at least a "thanks." The person is going out of their way to say something nice for you--common courtesy dictates that you should acknowledge that. So I'd add a "thanks" to the beginning of any of the examples above.

Answer 2

"Thanks"

Unless there is a particular reason you don't want the complimenter to think you're so smart, this is enough to pretty much end the issue graciously.

This has indeed worked for me in the past - I have from time to time received compliments, and whenever I simply thanked the person for the compliment, that has been the end of it, though I have to admit I am just assuming that the person paying the compliment hasn't been secretly offended - indeed I am not when the roles are reversed.

The reason I think the OP should only answer "Thanks" (or "Thank you" if that is preferable) is that the tone of the post implies the OP is feeling a bit awkward about receiving the compliment, and would like that line of conversation dropped. A simple "Thanks" puts a neat full-stop on it and they can get on with whatever the prior conversation was.

There is no need to make excuses when receiving a compliment.

Answer 3

You're so smart.

From your example, the asker is really just 'decorating' their thank you. I'm sure they think you are smart, but really, they're mostly expressing gratitude. That being the case, you can just respond with "no problem" or "you're welcome" as if they had just said "Thank you very much!".

...seemed really obvious to me because I've been writing code for several years.

Bingo - just let them know that! I would respond with "It's just practice" or something similar. This achieves a couple of things:

• it doesn't deflect the compliment, which can be ungracious.
• it subtly moves the underlying comparison from "You're smart/I'm dumb" to "You're experienced/I'm still learning", which is much nicer. This underlying comparison seems to be a big part of why people want to reject compliments.
• It lets the asker know they're on their way to being smart like you. "Practicing" is much more aspirational than "Getting smarter".

Edit to add sources: I've been in senior development roles and experienced exactly this situation a number of times: it seems pretty common when mentoring less experienced people. This is how I've handled it, and it has worked very well for me thus far.