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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?
#82I've a Manager who loves one thing - Ask questions. No answer ever comes from him, but he keeps on asking questions. And as you can imagine, I am always at the end of it giving him answers. If I ask clarification questions back, he counters that with a "Five Why" type questioning and most of the time I get frustrated, owns it up to give answers and cut the conversation.
After a few months working under him, I started wearing out and started taking it personally. I started attacking him back. Not only did that cause friction between us, he gave me a bad performance review rating. I didn't give up and kept resisting one way questioning. I reminded company pays him for providing solutions and answers when his team is in need, and not sit there asking questions.
A friend of mine understood the pains I go through, and suggested I read the book, "How to master the subtle art of not giving a f*ck". I can say I am now at peace and don't care a sh#t about most things. I am still employed, but stopped worrying and taking things personally.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#83I try to project the criticism back to my original thought process when doing the work. Why did I choose the approach I did? Did I consider the issue brought up in the review? How would things have been different if I had?
I find this last part helps me integrate the feedback by effectively running little simulations of how I could have taken a different approach. It seems to deactivate the otherwise prominent memory of the embarrassment of a bad review by replacing it with memories of the simulations. I have a terrible habit of ruminating over incidents from decades ago that my mind has tagged as shameful even though they’re objectively irrelevant… Thinking about detailed steps for different approaches and building associated mental images seems to help divert the shame tag.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#84Learn to give feedback that doesn’t hurt people’s feelings.
This lets you more easily see what people are trying to say separate from how they say it.
Classically, programmers tend to be both not very sensitive towards how they phrase feedback, and fragile wrt. criticism of their own work. So many programmers work alone because of this.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I do this with Twitter/Reddit comments and occasionally HN. 99/100 I write the comment and then close the tab. Writing helps me process my emotions and then I can leave it "unresolved".
Most of the time if someone is being intentionally rude on the internet, they're also being a troll. Don't feed the animals!
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#86improvement
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#87Information is power. If you're doing something wrong you want to find out. If somebody has some opinion about you - you want to find out. Make sure it's easy for people to give you information even when it's something bad about you.
That being said be careful not to go too far with it. People are only humans, in that they have their own interests, flaws, play power and status games and so on. More often than not criticism, even when it appears to be constructive, it's just a jab at you, especially if it's delivered in public. Nobody's work is perfect and hindsight is 20/20. Take everything with a grain of salt and be careful not to undermine your position in companies or your self image by being too welcoming about criticism.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#88IMHO the best way to handle a negative feedback is to try to learn what was wrong and why you made mistake in order to improve and don't repeat them again and again.
Everybody can make mistake, the difference between a mediocre professional and a great professional is that the great will not repeat the mistakes.
Remove any kind of personal attack, analyze your actions and think about how you may improve to avoid making mistakes and getting negative feedbacks again.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#89I've a Manager who loves one thing - Ask questions. No answer ever comes from him, but he keeps on asking questions. And as you can imagine, I am always at the end of it giving him answers. If I ask clarification questions back, he counters that with a "Five Why" type questioning and most of the time I get frustrated, owns it up to give answers and cut the conversation. After a few months working under him, I started…
I thought this was going to be a positive story about how his approach helped teach you to explore solutions via the Socratic method, I wasn't expecting your reaction at all.
Many people would hate a manager who only gave solutions, often described as micro-managing. Here we have a manager who seems hated because he only asked questions.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally?
#90The 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 e…
I think this is a great comment, with much broader implications for living well. Unmooring the sense of self from external factors is one important aspect of spirituality.