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

Emotions are good. I disagree with everyone telling you to ignore your emotions. We're wired to remember emotional moments and to forget when we're indifferent. Most of the criticism I didn't fix wasn't because it was too emotional, it was because I couldn't care. If something sucks, at least there's a better chance you'll learn the lesson. Stay angry but make sure you learn the lesson.

You need to instead translate the criticism into something actionable. Always have in the back of your mind the question what to do different and when. And when responding to people, remember to respond in a way that they will want to criticize you again (it's ok to argue, but not ok to turn it back into something personal).

I don't try to control my anger at all. You're missing out on all the evolutionary benefits of sharpened memory in important situations. Stay nice and be angry with people instead of at people. Make sure they don't take it personally.

1. That feeling needs to go away. Accept the intent of the criticism; fix the problem and move on. 2. I know I'm not perfect and do miss things or make mistakes. 3. As an engineer, any code I write I own it only for a short while before I move on and someone else owns.

>Can a slacker goodfornothing McDonald's-working college dropout that only live day to day, party to party, feel self-worth or should they feel worthless?

The person you posited has more self-worth, by definition, than the self-doubting programmers in this thread. Precisely because they are getting by while doing something much less "meaningful" or "useful" (as evaluated by others) than a job in software engineering.

(Of course, I'm talking about the hypothetical person I imagined when I read your post; most such people that I've met in real life actually feel pretty bad about themselves, party to numb the pain, or because they have nothing better to do, and actually feel worse after they've had their "fun", et cetera. But let's roll with your scenario for a second, I think you're on to something important.)

Maybe this person doesn't have to suck up to a pointy-haired boss, or doesn't have to mentally model arcane concepts that are subject to planned obsolescence anyway, or doesn't participate in the violation of people's minds facilitated by the infotech industry.

Or maybe they still do the aforementioned things but on their own terms. Maybe they code for fun and write malware when hungover out of pure malice. Or they don't. Maybe they're a hooker on smack and just shat on your floor. It does not matter. What does matter is that this hypothetical person does not have the experiences that make you ascribe "negative" or "insufficient" self-worth to yourself.

In other words:

* You can be an absolutely awful horrible piece of shit person by anyone else's (or everyone else's) standards and still have a feeling of self-worth. This is by definition: self-worth is the worth that you ascribe to yourself. No matter how much you care (or not - it's a choice) about other people, self-worth is self-worth; worth to "civilized society", "a value system" or "an individual other" is not self-worth, by definition.

* On the other hand, the "need" to experience something that others call "self-worth" does not in fact originate from the self, but is a vague obligation imposed onto you by others: the obligation to have some sort of nebulous experience that others call "a feeling of self-worth".

* There is no such thing as "should feel worthless": nobody gets to tell anyone else how to feel. Imposing an obligation on someone to experience an emotional state is, technically, a violation of bodily integrity. Yeah I said it. Whatever real, physical neurochemical process lies behind the experience related to the concept of "self-worth", is a normal part of the body's homeostasis, serving to ensure the self-preservation of an animal that is able to kill itself for entirely abstract reasons (such as awareness of own mortality, and downhill from there).

In even fewer words: in my book, someone who is an "ok friend" and throws "average parties", is defined as "a waste of my time". But they still get to live on the same planet and breathe the same air as me with my silly book. I don't get to decide their self-worth for them, and nobody, and nothing, gets to decide that for you, either.

Therefore: you can feel perfectly good about your successes and failures without even entertaining the notion of there being a concept of "self-worth". According to nobody in particular, this is actually preferable, for Occam's razor reasons if nothing else.

In theory, you can be a very "successful" person and still feel worthless; in practice, the feeling of worthlessness usually prevents one from becoming "successful", and makes it look as if it's the other way around.

Ultimately, the matter can be put like this: do you see yourself as goods to be bought and sold? If yes, then go ahead and demonstrate your high "feeling of self-worth" as much as you have to. If no, then why even bother with pricing yourself?

I think your quotes around "insults" are a pretty good example of how you can use an otherwise normal question to cast doubt on someone without even changing the wording. That technique isn't limited to fairly benign examples like this, face-to-face communication has subtleties that are even harder to pinpoint, and especially if someone has social anxiety or trouble speaking in front of groups, something like that can materially damage someone without even having real criticism. If there's real criticism mixed in, especially if the person speaking has clout in that context, that person can either inform someone or totally harpoon them with the same exact criticism. That is a foundational skill among lawyers who take depositions or cross examine people during a trial.

My response was taking into account many assumptions, but Deming’s 'Out of the Crisis' is nearly 500 pages on the topic, so I can’t do him justice in a few lines.

Let me try and give you a simple illustration. So imagine you’re a new manager at an ad agency and you task a team of writers with developing some ad copy. You get the documents back and they are filled with typos. The writers are all professionals with experience and training. So you have to ask yourself, in assigning the task did I develop a stable system of copy development? The result is a major amount of rework and may increase the cost of the project or delay the deliverables to the client, so no this isn’t a stable system of production. So as the manager you need to look into the causes of failure, perhaps it was unrealistic timelines, a lack of a dictionary for use by the team, or a lack of internal process the writers should use like proofreading their work before submitting it, or lack of training on effective proofreading. There could be a number of barriers in the system that are getting in the way of quality goals that as a manager you can address.

Of course, some people are in the wrong job or incompetent and that’s another story, but Deming argued that most problems in organizations are caused by poor management and faulty processes, not by individual workers. He advocated for a systemic approach to quality improvement that involves everyone in the organization.