Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?

> I try to be mindful that the relationship between my work and my person / identity is one of many such relationships in life, and maybe even not the most important one.

Yes, this realization has also been important to me. Our personalities have relationships with so many aspects of our lives.

For example: spirituality, emotional intelligence, creative expressions, physical strength, physical appearance, wisdom, appreciation of beauty and aesthetics, and insightfulness. We find identity in our social interactions and friendships, family bonds, adventurous endeavors, empathy, altruism, and our sense of integrity. Leadership abilities, an open-minded growth mindset, resilience, perseverance, and tenacity also play significant roles. Sensitivity, conscientiousness, and our predispositions towards introversion or extraversion shape our interactions with the world, and our ambition, passion, zeal, and humor color our life experiences. Whether we lean towards optimism or pessimism, our self-confidence, our work, vitality, and self-care habits are intrinsic parts of us. We are defined, too, by our commitment to diverse causes, our independence, reliability, online presence, sources of entertainment, groundedness, approachability, friendliness, and our management of financial matters. Personal growth, achievements, hobbies, political affiliations, activism, adaptability, assertiveness, and self-expression add further layers to our identities. Curiosity, disciplinary commitment, frugality or extravagance, generosity or self-centeredness, humility or ostentation, innovative or traditional mindset, mindfulness or airheadedness, pragmatism, respectfulness, philosophical inclinations (like Stoicism or Hedonism), tact or goofiness, virtuosity or departure from traditional virtues, progressivism, visionary thinking or living in the present moment, nurturing of others, commitment to others, and many other facets of life all come together to make a person who they are.

So, where does work fit into all of this? It's but one facet of our lives, almost inconsequential in the grand tapestry.

In societies influenced by American culture (as well as others like the UK, India, and Japan), there's often an undue emphasis on one's professional identity. The question, "What do you do?" has almost become a conventional conversation opener. This, however, is a vestige of outdated social hierarchies rooted in class and caste systems. The modern, holistic sense of self that is prevalent across much of the world has also been gradually permeating American culture. But, this cultural baggage can make us fixate too much on our professions.

But we are not forced to stick around in tradition and the past, unless we want to. I certainly do not. And that helps with seeing work for what it is in our lives - just one small aspect.

EDIT: Rephrased the long list into a paragraph so that it does not take up half of the comments on the page vertically :)

Jeff Atwood has a great article The 10 Commandments of Software Engineering (something like that) and one of the first ones is "you are not your code". There's no trick to this. Sometimes you write bad code. Even if you're a bitwizard demigod who can explain the route of an electron through your web3 Blockchain distributed app or whatever it is you do, you can still write bad code (and will). Nobody writes perfect code all of the time. Nobody writes beautiful mind algorithms all day with ease. It just doesn't happen.

Letting go of the ego a bit is something you have to find within yourself.

After that, it's easy. If the criticism is about the code, either accept it or be analytical with a thoughtful "defense" of the code. It leads to good technical conversation and the code benefits from it, and either one or both of you will learn something. Learning things tends to go away the more senior you get so the opportunity becomes exciting at some point.

If it's about you personally, then it's no longer constructive criticism and thus a civil response about keeping things on topic usually suffices.

There is an excellent TED talk on the relationship between self-worth and procrastination that also, like you, makes a point about separating "me and my work" [1].

Watching this about a year ago was eye opening to me and I wished I'd found this video when I started studying in college!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52lZmIafep4

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.

Take it as a learning opportunity and ask the critiquer how to improve, avoid mistakes or get to a better solution. Also, now it's on them :)