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

If you’re part of an online community where bad intentions are the norm, I’d recommend moving on to another. Why spend your time with a group that frequently makes you feel bad on purpose?

> How do you deal with people that don't have positive intentions, but actually have the precise opposite intentions

You move on to the third paragraph. Either ignore it (that can be tough, but the sooner you let it go and continue with your day the easier it becomes) or respectfully point out the problem. Try to have them not take it personally lest they become defensive and double down. The goal is deescalation. Speak specifically to the content of their message instead of them as a person. Use a variation of assuming good intentions: assume they are normally a good and reasonable person who is having a bad day and lashed out once. Empathise. Give them an out to apologise for their behaviour and they often will.

When that doesn’t work, reread your reply. Was it respectful and imbued with good intentions? Is it clear the goal was to improve the discourse? If not, learn from it and try again in another situation. But if you feel you did the best you could and the other party is being intransigent, let it go. Feel good about your effort. Even if you were unsuccessful with that particular individual, other people reading the exchange may take something positive out of it.

Be sure to never reply in anger. That only generates more conflict and ruins your day further. There’s no point to that.

Each individual piece of work separately, sure.

In aggregate, anything that doesn't average out probably points at something to work on learning.

A version that didn’t have all the information, a version that doesn’t have the skills and experience present me has, a version not even present in the conversation.

It’s a small way to create some distance between the work and your person.

Another thing to remember is to always ensure the criticism is against the work and against some shared measure of quality.

Too often criticism actually is personal (unintentionally or not) or the criticism is about a requirement that wasn’t shared at the time. Both of which are about the inexperience of the critic not you.

I think of this in two ways. First, in a team, we're all collaborating on the project. Different people have different ideas and different experience, and debating can make for better results. In my last job, there was one particular person I disagreed with all the time (down to hops vs malt) but for that reason was a great person to collaborate with.

Second, there's code review. My last place was very much into its style guides and best practices at the individual PR level (but remarkably bad at higher levels; the prevailing large-scale design rule being ‘ship the org chart’). I think of that sort of code review comment much like a compiler or analyzer message: sometimes it's right, and caught a mistake. Sometimes it's a false positive, and you just have to change something to make the tool shut up.

(Third, I wouldn't be able to recognize an actual personal attack unless it were extremely blatant.)