Ask HN: Best constructive criticism

One of the most memorable was early in primary flight training for the Navy. It was my last flight before the Christmas Holidays and it went poorly, not F but C- quality. I really liked the instructor, a cool guy helicopter pilot. Walking back from the plane, he said it didn’t go well. I agreed and said my mind just wasn’t in it, thinking about the holidays. He stopped, turned to me and said, “I don’t want to hear that f#%ing s%$t. Don’t make f#%ing excuses.” He said a few more mean things that I can’t recall.

I didn’t like the instructor after that, but the lesson stuck. I never made excuses again. Over the years I noticed that a lot of the people I respected the most would do the opposite, take responsibility for everything, even if it wasn’t really their fault. It was a recurring theme in Naval Aviation. I saw a similar ethos when I worked with Special Forces.

At my current job, a late stage startup, I see directors blame other teams, blame subordinates, blame everyone but themselves. In Naval Aviation it’s called the ‘excuse matrix’. I’m sure that early in a startups life this behavior must be minimal since too much would doom the business, however, there’s nothing like life or death to truly hone the principle of not making excuses.

Post in a forum criticising of loading/handling (filtered) POSTed form data into individual strings, the criticism was "The better way is to use an array. What good reason do you have to to load strings individually?"

Not only did this provide a logical alternative but it was open to letting me defend my method... Thinking on it arrays were the way to go solves other issues like retrieval and storage.

My reasons were more or less, "cause that's how I learned it." The question might have been a bit more condescending but the open opportunity to defend myself made me think harder on what I was doing vs the alternative.

Made me re-factor a ton of code for the better, was a lot of work - but I could see it was the right way to do it.