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Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
41–50 of 653 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#42It's kind of dumb, but I think about a line from Casino Royale - M says to James Bond "I want you to take your ego out of the equation and judge the situation dispassionately."
It's unlikely that the person making the comment is out to harm or anger you. Ideally you are both on the same team, trying to perform some task for the benefit of your employer. In that case, recognize that your ego or pride has been engaged; observe it, but then put it aside and get back to work.
If they ARE actively trying to anger your or harm your career (rare, but some people are just toxic) all the more reason to ignore the provocation.
My main challenge is when people dig in their heels about technical solutions that I find distasteful. For me that's less about how beautiful the code is and more whether it solves the problem and will be maintainable. Even here a lot of arguments can be ignored. Again, make your ego and identity as small as possible. Brace style? Tabs vs spaces? I honestly don't care. If someone wants to argue about those things I'm happy to let them win.
Be half-monk, half-hitman and get the job done.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#43Kudos on the realisation and desire to improve. There are a couple of tricks you can use, especially when it’s asynchronous textual communication: Assume positive intentions from the other person. Imagine them as having written with a genuine smile on their faces. Don’t think of it as them versus you, but you and them together against the problem. That defaults ambiguity to the more pleasant side and allows you to re…
> That doesn’t mean you have to take abuse. But even if someone is unambiguously disrespectful (e.g. name calling) you can generally be respectful when pointing that out or simply not respond.
Simply not responding leads to this person bullying you and/or the entire team eventually. Unless this happens really once, which in my experience now is not the case. Some people are just bullies, not the type they come and hit you in your face, but do snappy comments, or shaming you, etc., and they should not be allowed to continue with their behavior. If your manager doesn't do anything about it, you have to do something about it. It takes bad experience to realize that, but once you understand "the game", you will never let this happen again. Just learn to distinguish between personal attack AND "PR comment" on your code, though.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#44I don't and i focus entirely on solo projects, most likely to my own detriment.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#45I usually try to replay the comments in the voice of my mentor and it somehow diffuses the feelings aspect of it
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#46Kudos on the realisation and desire to improve. There are a couple of tricks you can use, especially when it’s asynchronous textual communication: Assume positive intentions from the other person. Imagine them as having written with a genuine smile on their faces. Don’t think of it as them versus you, but you and them together against the problem. That defaults ambiguity to the more pleasant side and allows you to re…
Stopping myself from replying immediately has saved my bacon more than a few times.
Another good approach: Write down that email/ message in a text editor but just leave it there for a day.
Often, I'd realize that I don't want to send it at all. The emotion was processed and now it's fine.
Sometimes, there is a valid point (e.g. because someone was rude in tone) and I'd just give that as feedback in a non-violent manner.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#47If you are improving every day, look back at your work from 5 years ago and how it isn’t your best and didn’t define you to improve to today.
In sums ways you’d hope todays work wasn’t don’t improving or you would end up having pages.
Criticism is that if it’s not improved upon.
The operation who gets to learn, grow and improve is the winter compared to the person pointing it out.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#48Practice! Also group crits. While the format differs from place to place, in art / CGI / illustration / animation a crit (critique) is a session where everybody lines up their work and then you go around the room and each person critiques each others work, saying what you like about it, what you dislike, what you would change etc., while the person being critiqued takes on board or pushes back against the criticisms. Because you're taking it in turns to critique and be critiqued, and are doing it in person, there's social pressure to be polite and constructive, however it is still very uncomfortable to begin with. But do it every week for a few years and you end up with a very thick skin. You can take lessons from the process into other areas of your life and even introduce something parallel when developing where you do group code reviews.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#49It's usually not personal - having a professional detachment helps.
Remember the only way from amateur to professional is by constant improvement, which requires constant critique of your performance.
As you improve the criticism becomes less, you also have to rise above the amateurs who don't know how to adequately structure criticism, so that it written in a less personal way. Early on in your career this may seem deliberate and you will make a lot of mistakes, but it does fade.
You should also have 2 tenets:
- It doesn't matter what happens, you are paid for the code regardless, so don't hold so much pride.
- Make sure your reviews of others hold them to the same standard and language so they feel what feedback like that does and helps them adapt (it's also revenge served cold if that's your thing).
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#50In a lot of interactions, the person giving feedback is just doing their job.
I’ve been a team lead and CTO, and when I was presented with some strategy or deliverable, it was my responsibility from that side of the table to speak from experience and point out banana skins and improvements.
There is really nothing personal at all in these interactions, it was just trying to deliver a better product as a team.
If you are putting forward bad work, or I am giving poor advice then the business has a performance management problem, but the to and fro of feedback is just a normal part of teamwork.