I am not my work.
Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
141–150 of 653 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#142not everything is on you, the observation may be valid, but there is always a way to word it such that it is more akin to "brainstorming", realize that some people are just socially inept, even more so in the tech sector, play the game of "this is a stupid response, what is the gist of it, and how could i have worded it were it my observation" (and also fix the mistake if valid)
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#143Good advice overall. I face this issue at work, where any feedback I take personally and feel that I suck at my work.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#144At some point, I realized that there's a disconnect between "me" and "my work". My work is a result of circumstance, like, what my mood was when I did it, how well I know the particular domain, if I've seen solutions to similar problems before, what tools were available and understandable to me at the time. In other words, the quality of my work depends much more on what the particular task was, than on some inherent…
Do you have a hard rule against saying sorry? I apologize not for the mistake in my work, but for wasting other people's time and mental bandwidth.
I have a hard rule of not apologizing for honest mistakes. If I took a decision with the best intentions and it was the right call with all the knowledge I had at the time, I don't apologize for it.
I do apologize for mistakes due to laziness, shortcuts, emotionally charged decisions and the like. Things I knew at the time (or could have known) were not the optimal choice.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#145At some point, I realized that there's a disconnect between "me" and "my work". My work is a result of circumstance, like, what my mood was when I did it, how well I know the particular domain, if I've seen solutions to similar problems before, what tools were available and understandable to me at the time. In other words, the quality of my work depends much more on what the particular task was, than on some inherent…
It's easy to disconnect the work from yourself if there are circumstances outside of yourself, like an unrealistic deadline. But your mood or level of experience (examples you gave) seem exactly the sort of thing that someone could use to blame themselves...
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#146Assuming the criticism is valid and not nit-picking, embrace the fact that this is free education that isn't saddling you with additional six-figure debt!
Learning on the job is important, and you could treat it as such. (Pay attention to the sort of mistakes you are making, classify them, address the reasons that you are making them. For example, maybe muscle memory leaves you forgetting to check some assumption. Maybe you can invest in linting/testing/patterns that make those classes of errors less likely?)
If you're making small mistakes that are noticed, one way to fix it is to make those mistakes less often -- even better if you can stop your team making the same class of errors too.
If the criticism is more about the way you are doing your work, maybe the focus should be on "soft-skills" instead. Are you expressing your ideas clearly in some well thought-out manner BEFORE coding (so that you can get input and buy-in from other affected parties?). Is the churn in the codebase causing others to be negatively affected in their daily work having to react to the changes you are making? The default opinion of most folk is usually "change is bad", so you need to build a reputation of making net-positive contributions. Solicited feedback from people you work with is very valuable for gleaming where you might be missing this mark.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#147Given how you express yourself, I wonder if you could have some success finding one or more ways to afford yourself to be more detached from your output.
I can sympathize with where you are, as I believe I've been there, but am not there any longer. I've detached somewhat successfully from my own output by virtue of two things, the first and most important one is adapting a growth mindset, which you can read more about here
and I carry that mindset shift in all parts of my life. Outside of coding, I do a lot of physical activities, and I have meaningfully changed the way I conceive of "failure" so that I have an easier time feeling inspired to try again.
Honestly, I sometimes try to learn by trying to fail as fast as possible. It's quite enriching and takes less of a mental toll.
Besides reading the articles on the Learner Lab (there are some good Power Company climbing podcasts where they interview Trevor Ragan - the guy behind it - that I much prefer to the articles) there is another active choice you could do and that'd be reading the first few chapters of The Rock Warrior's Way which talks a lot about how _not_ to derive a sense of personal worth based on how your performance is perceived by external parties.
Lastly, and this cannot be done actively, eventually, you might find that after you've written buckets and buckets of code during your career you simply care less about it as every design choice you make becomes a smaller percentage of choices you've made in the domain. I believe that's something that has happened to me
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#148What you have encountered is actually one of the necessary steps to really become "a senior developer". And congratulations, you have already passed the biggest part of that hurdle: becoming aware of the issue.
There are things that are fragile, things that break when they encounter a shock. Such as porcelain, when transported. There are things that are non-fragile, things that do not break when they encounter a similar shock. Like a teddy bear, when transported. And there are things that are anti-fragile, things that improve when they are exposed to a shock, like the immune system. If you are not exposed to series of smaller shocks as a child, your immune system does not develop properly.
So you need to develop an anti-fragile attitude towards criticism, in order to become a better developer from the criticism. If you do not learn that, you will be stuck at the level you are at the moment. You can do this at the meta-level as well at the same time: become anti-fragile towards handling criticism in general, and becoming a better human being from it.
The key to hacking yourself is to increase your awareness of your emotional state. When you become aware that you are angry, the anger is losing the grip it has over you. When you are angry, you are sometimes doing things you would not have done if you were not angry. (Sometimes anger is healthy, it may also be a signal to us that our boundaries have been violated.)
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#149I treat criticism as a valuable resource to help me grow, and I'm grateful that somebody took the trouble to help me do that.
I remember someone once asked how their business could be more successful. The reply was to fail more often!
We will often learn best from our mistakes, if we let a bit of our ego go and avoid being defensive.
Having said that, I'm not some saint! I have to remind myself that criticism is valuable to me, it's natural to feel a bit defensive.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#150In art school, we spent a lot of time learning how to give and receive critiques, because the fastest way to improve was to try frequently and critique often. You learn very early to divorce your ego and sense of self from your artworks and embrace every attempt as an opportunity to improve towards an ideal you can never reach. You also learn how to give meaningful criticism without being an asshole. Writing code is…
I also got my first critiques when getting a degree in Art. One of the most memorable lessons and discussions was when I first was taught that once you put your work out there, it is no longer about you. Not at all.
It is about the work, and how other people react to it. The impact is has on other is all that matters. Your intent is interesting, but not relevant to their reaction. So if your work does not get the reaction you hoped for, that not a personal statement about you, it is simply something for you to work on.