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

The reason I took criticism of my work personally was that I build my identity around the fact that I'm smart and good with computers. If you think of yourself as having value BECAUSE you're good at X - it's almost impossible not to take criticism personally.

You can pretend not to care, because it seems professional - but inside you'll still be hurting, and by default you'll still act to prevent the damage to your ego - anything else will require constant attention. It's not sustainable.

The solution is to detach the perception of your value as a human being from your work.

I work in consulting; everything I do I do for the customer and to improve their codebase. I often see a lot of terrible code. I change it and try to educate the coder who was responsible. When I get comments on my code I will always assume that I am wrong. Not because I am bad but because I am not that long with the company. I am missing the domain knowledge, ways of working, standards and all that. When I do get responses that "this does not work" I ask the person why he thinks that is so. Often it is a misunderstanding on how they think that API works it is not very often that I am wrong but I do not always assume that I am better.

Since I have been working in this manner people are more open to changes themselfs. It works both ways.

tldr; a lot of times, 'constructive criticism' is just a dressed-up personal attack that you are probably perceiving correctly as a personal attack.

I have gotten honest, sane non-trivial constructive feedback/criticism of my work before, but I don't tend to remember it unless it was extraordinary - like someone went way out of their way to pump me up before burning me (my work) down with some accurate and correct criticism. I like managers and senior co-workers like that, good on them.

I don't necessarily remember the specifics of bad criticism, but I feel like bad criticism is bad because it is either designed to be taken personally, or is so careless that it is inevitable that it will be taken personally -- that is, it actually _is_ a personal attack, dressed up as work criticism.

I have vague recollections of various project managers and lead/senior engineers during various tenures that I have butted heads with due to their insecurities, incompetence, etc. There are petty people all over the place, esp in a 9 to 5 environment -- wage slavery can be a breeding ground for all sorts of bad behavior.

I do like working with smart, confident, nice people -- not an easy combination to find in a single person, much less an entire team/company.

That said, I like the whole 'mindfulness' approach to life, think it's worthwhile, don't necessarily see it as 'killing part of yourself' like i used to, more like a necessary evil in this very crazy world.

Stop measuring your value as a person by the quality of your work. The 21st century has seen a mighty effort to convince us that we are no more than our work ethic. None of this shit matters; I'm sure you have or will sooner or later see something you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into binned at the whim of some ladder climber looking to make their mark, or similar. We're here to live; use your job to facilitate that and remember: it's just a job.

(Assuming youre talking about 'work' in a professional context)