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

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

#571

Post by xyzelement »

A frame of mind that helps me is: I am doing important and difficult work and I cannot expect it to land perfectly. Whether it's because I did something wrong or because I didn't explain it well, the "surface area" for someone to see something I missed is pretty large.

So you go into your day expecting that there'd be feedback (and in fact if you don't get any, you should be concerned) Then when you get it, it's not something that smacks you in the fact, it's something you wanted and expected.

BTW no all feedback is useful, you'll still have to filter it for relevance but you need to have an open aperture first.

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

#572

Post by Zetice »

It took me a long tome to mostly get over this, but a turning point was realizing how temporal code is. It’s written in a snapshot in time, to solve a problem that may evolve hour by hour, competing with dozens of other tasks also needing attention.

So what you produced in that maelstrom is really just a reflection of the moment, not of you.

This also helps me not judge other peoples' code. I only see the outcome (the code), not all of the inputs so it's hard to know if this is good work or not in a "is this person good at their job sense" (though obviously there is better and worse code).

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

#573

Post by Nemi »

kukkeliskuu wrote: post #148

What 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 simi…

Without humility, growth is limited

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

#574

Post by topaz0 »

macksd wrote: post #343

I had a job where they gave training on how to constructively engage with the open source community, and one of the big points was, "you don't suck, the patch sucks". Oh you have a bug in the patch? No, there's a bug in the patch. Oh you missed an edge case? No, there's an edge case nobody had documented yet. The point was mostly about how to give feedback on the patch, and to never phrase it about the person persona…

This is a great and underappreciated point: the person giving the criticism has a lot of power in determining whether or not you take it personally. I would add that having good mentors who give criticism in this way also helps you to internalize the separation between yourself and your work, so that it's easier to take harsh criticism later in life.

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

#577

Post by lazide »

seedie wrote: post #506
lumb63 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard similar statements from other people, and I have a disconnect that prevents me from understanding. Why would someone want to detach their self worth from what they do? If someone ought not feel a negative emotion in response to doing something “bad”, by what logic can they justify feeling something positive in response to doing something “good”? I cannot conceive of a world view that allows one to feel pro…

There is another, way more important, difference. You know your friends for who they are. You know the criminals only for what they do.

It's very dangerous to not also take into account what your friends do (or who the criminals are).

Words and emotions are easy to fake, deeds are much harder.

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

#578

Post by defendBanana »

Something that has helped me, in many similar situation is to restate my intent.

Reminding myself that my goal is to be a better engineer tomorrow and not really to do a great job right now. I am after getting better, current work that i am doing is just way to get better. Taking such a position seems to solve lot of problems.

Criticism becomes something that i am actually after. I am not attached to what I build in the past. Of-course it is crap, i would not do it the same way now as i am better.

Take pride in getting better. Not in in the job done.

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

#579

Post by lazide »

polygotdomain wrote: post #338
_popcornLurker wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm...I have to chime in here. "Anti-fragile attitude" when it comes to criticism is not built by tolerance. Quite the opposite actually. It is a common misconception. While making yourself numb against criticism IS a solution but not by far the best one. A high criticism tolerance is learned by understanding that ones self worth is not attached to output or delivery. (This is hard in our industry) It comes from self…

>"Anti-fragile attitude" when it comes to criticism is not built by tolerance. Quite the opposite actually. I agree with your overall statement, but I think the specific point above could be misinterpreted in a nonconstructive way. What it seems like you're trying to say is that we shouldn't just be learning how to deal with criticism by tuning it out or building up defense mechanisms against it. That I agree with. H…

Exposure - but with appropriate processing in a productive way. Otherwise it just produces PTSD.

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

#580

Post by Viliam1234 »

lumb63 wrote: post #312
_popcornLurker wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm...I have to chime in here. "Anti-fragile attitude" when it comes to criticism is not built by tolerance. Quite the opposite actually. It is a common misconception. While making yourself numb against criticism IS a solution but not by far the best one. A high criticism tolerance is learned by understanding that ones self worth is not attached to output or delivery. (This is hard in our industry) It comes from self…

I’ve heard similar statements from other people, and I have a disconnect that prevents me from understanding. Why would someone want to detach their self worth from what they do? If someone ought not feel a negative emotion in response to doing something “bad”, by what logic can they justify feeling something positive in response to doing something “good”? I cannot conceive of a world view that allows one to feel pro…

> I cannot conceive of a world view that allows one to feel proud of their accomplishments but does not require their disappointment in their shortcomings.

That is a great point... but the answer is that you should also take your accomplishments with a grain of salt.

Basically, yes, your outcomes are a function of your inputs (talent, work, etc.), but it is a very noisy function and people usually underestimate that part. Sometimes you do the right thing and fail anyway, in the sense that "the right thing" is a strategy that succeeds with probability 95%, but today just happened to be that remaining 5%. And if the next day you apply the same strategy to another task and succeed, it doesn't mean that you have improved.

If you want to base your self worth on your outcomes, at least choose the long-term trends over the short-term noise. If you usually do a good work, then the bug you made yesterday should be interpreted as an accident, rather than you being bad at what you do. And vice versa, the successfully completed project is a combination of your skills plus the good luck of not having one of those accidents today; both of them were necessary together.

> If someone’s worth is not tied to what they do, then the criminals, liars, frauds, cheaters, etc., of the world are every bit as valuable as our loved ones, idols, great contributors, etc.

Let's not judge moral character the same way we judge talent. To be a great contributor is a combination of character and talent. To be a criminal is a failure of character, but there are both talented and talentless criminals.

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