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

There was a guy in a senior tech role I once encountered in a consulting gig who never let an opportunity to put someone down publicly go by. One time, a young researcher came and gave a (remote) presentation. At the end of the presentation during the Q&A, this guy basically says, "don't you think that your project is a complete waste of time in light of factors x, y, z?"

For my project, I was building some tools that were helping me understand the problem space (which was new to me and that he fundamentally did not understand himself). In a team stand-up, which included the CTO, I shared that I had built a useful tool that was helping me and he chimes in: "I think that you just spend all of your time making tools and don't do any real work." Even if there was a conversation to be had about how I was spending my time, it was ridiculous that he was bringing this up for the first time not 1:1 but with the whole group. I resigned a few days after that interaction (which was probably at least the fourth or fifth time he'd pulled something similar in the two months I worked with them). BTW, he would never just say "you are a moron" but it was very clearly the subtext of almost all of the feedback he gave, except to the most junior people who didn't threaten him in any way.

Criticism about code is either accurate or useless. If it’s useless, no point getting bothered by someone’s bad opinions. If it’s accurate, then thank god you won’t have to discover it later when it bites you in production. Always good to remember all the times you’ve messed up, makes you appreciate the extra eyes. Plus, no matter the quality, you learn a little more about programming and the people you work with by seeing their thoughts applied to something you made.

I would like to say first is that: we are all humans.

When you are passionate in the work you do, invest time and effort to completing work for someone to find flaws, it's hard to not be offended and take things personally.

But as humans, we are able to learn. You made a big step in being aware that you are taking criticism personally. From here, you need to learn to disassociate that what you contribute is not a byproduct of you as a person. It is a byproduct of the ask, a byproduct of your knowledge at that moment of when did your work.

To shift your perspective from immediately seeing feedback as a personal attack, practice gratitude. Be grateful that someone else took time from their busy day to look closely at your contribution and provide feedback. Sure, its their responsibility, but they invested their time to review the contribution and provide feedback that you did on your time. Sure, if the feedback is snarky, ask nicely to reword it for next time.

Third, take advantage of every opportunity as a learning opportunity. Maybe you will learn something, maybe you will be more aware of a specific type of feedback next time you are contributing, that you will try not to repeat the same error.

Your work is not who you are.

Your work is not who you are.

Your work is not who you are.

Really internalizing that is step one.

You are smart enough.

This one is a lot more subtle but worth a ton if you can internalize the implications of it. The fact is others are smarter than you, some aren't as smart as you, and the truth is you really shouldn't care.

What you do need to realize is that for all of us it boils down to the amount of work we need to do in order to accomplish something. And everyone varies widely in this.

Here is a thought experiment for you: say you take a person of below average intelligence, but they are raised among Geniuses basically. And these geniuses, being the chairing smart people that they are, never really let on that the person of below average intelligence is below average.

Now take that same scenario only this time the person is around not so good people they're not so smart they're not so caring.

Secret to getting your ego out of all of this is to compare and contrast those two scenarios and what they're going to mean mental health confidence of the person in question.

In the former scenario, that below average person is going to learn a ton of smart ways to do things. And they'll be confident in the doing them. Others may not even know how smart or lack of smart they are.

In the latter scenario the person is acutely aware of their deficiencies, and there's a whole bunch of negativity that comes with that, along with a lot of work because they didn't get to learn a lot of smart ways to do things and so they struggle. And they're not confident.

Rather than value your work as some reflection of your identity and how smart you are or some other attribute that you value it could be anything. Rather than do that, value outcomes and other people.

A very large part of who we are depends on who we hang with, and how we handle that.

I used to play it much differently, like some kind of competition, and criticism of my work had a high impact.

Today I seek people that are better than me in areas that I need to improve, and I share what I'm good at with others who want to improve.

And the outcome is we're getting shit done, it's done right, and we feel good about that which is done.

Let's take something simple like a presentation, or a chunk of code that has to perform a task.

What is more important?

Is it that your contributions are the very best?

Or, is the most important thing that that presentation or volume code nailed the task at hand?

Answering in the latter case allows you to take criticism of your work because it's all intended to achieve more important goal. The more we achieve those important goals more successful we are as people, teams, companies.

Here's one last thing comma and it's simple it's a phrase comma but it really helped me:

"Nice catch"

I was working with someone once was on a standard body and they have to do lots of detailed work and it gets revised many times and it has to be right it's right as people can get.

They used that phrase all the time when inconsistencies errors improvements were found.

And it took me a while, but I realized what that phrase meant. And it's about being one of a body of Skeptics being skeptical together to make it better whatever it is.

So give to get benefit of the doubt, give yourself a personal out so you don't have to take it personally and worry over every little thing or criticism that you may see.

Instead, think or say nice catch!

That really helped me make a big mental shift and a ton of things are so much easier today with you worries. Good luck and take care.

Meta: I use the Google voice input on this one, and hope to catch it in my edit window, until then please forgive typos and cats.

I don’t think there is an objective ranking of worths of humans. What is valuable is inherently subjective. Everyone has a different value system. However, I believe there is a large amount of overlap, especially in the extremes. Most people find murder and rape deplorable, for instance. That is the group I was referring to when I said “criminals”. Personally, I believe members of that group to be below valueless, i.e., I would benefit from their not existing. Others can draw their lines differently, but I suspect most people have some similar group.

Looking at your piano examples, if I had a friend who took up piano, I would admire that, because I value learning. I wouldn’t expect them to be good, and I would not think any less of them, because it is the gumption to try something new and to learn a new skill that I find value in, not playing the piano. If they had been playing piano for years and made mistakes, I would not think any less of them, because I don’t value the ability to play the piano. Presumably, after many years of practice, playing the piano would hold a lot of value to them (or it held value to them so they practiced; the point still stands) and so it would make a lot of sense to me that they would feel worse when they made mistakes; those mistakes demonstrate to them that they have less of something that they value.

Like I said, we all have different value systems, but our self-worths should be tied to how well we live our values, i.e., our integrity. If our self-worth is not tied to how well we represent our values, then it is, IMO, baseless.