There are things that are fragile, things that break when they encounter a shock. Such as porcelain, when transported. There are things that are non-fragile, things that do not break when they encounter a similar shock. Like a teddy bear, when transported. And there are things that are anti-fragile, things that improve when they are exposed to a shock, like the immune system. If you are not exposed to series of smaller shocks as a child, your immune system does not develop properly.

So you need to develop an anti-fragile attitude towards criticism, in order to become a better developer from the criticism. If you do not learn that, you will be stuck at the level you are at the moment. You can do this at the meta-level as well at the same time: become anti-fragile towards handling criticism in general, and becoming a better human being from it.

The key to hacking yourself is to increase your awareness of your emotional state. When you become aware that you are angry, the anger is losing the grip it has over you. When you are angry, you are sometimes doing things you would not have done if you were not angry. (Sometimes anger is healthy, it may also be a signal to us that our boundaries have been violated.)

"Anti-fragile attitude" when it comes to criticism is not built by tolerance. Quite the opposite actually. It is a common misconception. While making yourself numb against criticism IS a solution but not by far the best one.

A high criticism tolerance is learned by understanding that ones self worth is not attached to output or delivery. (This is hard in our industry) It comes from self-acceptance and compassion. And these values are learned early on. You'll find that the people that break down at the slightest criticism the most are those that were criticised the most as children as well. Those that had no room for being anything other than perfect. Where value was obtained from performance.

To take it even further...why see it as criticism at all? You are not your lines of code.

Furthermore, the idea of separating one’s self-worth from “what one does” does not make sense to me either. If someone’s worth is not tied to what they do, then the criminals, liars, frauds, cheaters, etc., of the world are every bit as valuable as our loved ones, idols, great contributors, etc. That view doesn’t make any sense to me; I wouldn’t be disappointed one ounce if all the criminals on the Earth vanished tomorrow, but I would be greatly disappointed if all my friends disappeared. The only difference between those people is “what they do/have done”.

One is an implied notion of objective rankings of worth of humans, and binary labels for people. Your post explicitly categorized “all criminals” and “all my friends” at disjoint sets. I can’t speak for your friends, but many of mine are “criminals” in the sense of disregard for drug laws. If you’re willing to sweep minor traffic violations under the heading “criminal” you’d probably sweep up most individuals with drivers licenses. Is the hypothetical person stealing so they (or their children) can eat irredeemable to you? There are certainly folks who on net do more harm than good, but rare are the people who truly only do bad to the world.

Second is a matter of perspective. If your friend started a new thing today, say learning the piano if they’ve never played an instrument, would you expect them to be good? If not, would you think less of them for trying? What if they’ve been playing for years, and one time when playing a song they’ve practiced many times they miss a few keys? Now replace the friend with yourself. Does your feelings about any of these change?

It’s not uncommon (especially in programmer types) to allow others more grace than we allow ourselves. You can be disappointed by your failures, and thrilled by your successes without impacting your sense of self worth.

Looking at your piano examples, if I had a friend who took up piano, I would admire that, because I value learning. I wouldn’t expect them to be good, and I would not think any less of them, because it is the gumption to try something new and to learn a new skill that I find value in, not playing the piano. If they had been playing piano for years and made mistakes, I would not think any less of them, because I don’t value the ability to play the piano. Presumably, after many years of practice, playing the piano would hold a lot of value to them (or it held value to them so they practiced; the point still stands) and so it would make a lot of sense to me that they would feel worse when they made mistakes; those mistakes demonstrate to them that they have less of something that they value.

Like I said, we all have different value systems, but our self-worths should be tied to how well we live our values, i.e., our integrity. If our self-worth is not tied to how well we represent our values, then it is, IMO, baseless.

Well, this seems like an extreme attitude that doesn't account for a large swath of how the world actually works, and is often gotten to that point by personal bias and not questioning beliefs constructively.

Its flawed because its an overgeneralization.

To provide an example, are there people that have been wrongfully convicted. Have any of those people been put to death as a result of those convictions. Assume for a second that you are one of those persons, and 12 people based upon some judge or skewed evidence chose that. Are you valueless? Who chose that you would be convicted? Wrong place at the wrong time?

There's a movie with Russel Crowe called The Next Three Days. It covers this type of premise. We never have absolute information, we have interpretations which are just as malleable as a game of telephone.

As for your ideas on value systems and integrity and self-worth, there are contradictions and its a bit convoluted. It fails to make distinctions between things within and outside your control, and the ever present ability of others to deceive sometimes even without their knowledge.

Whether society accurately captures and properly deals with those people is an entirely different subject. The fact society even has to do so is a net negative

Depending on how harshly one judges oneself is the reason for not handling criticism to ones failings. No one is perfect so one better be kind and try to learn from their mistakes and not take it on their ego.

Do they throw good parties?

Do they help their friends celebrate their successes and provide succor in times of need? If so, why shouldn't they feel some self-worth?

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?

Absolutely true and exactly my point: while you're feeling what others want you to feel, you're missing out on feeling things that do translate to actual, valid insights about your reality.

For example, this whole absurd notion of "self-worth" that we're discussing here. It's there to scam you into thinking about yourself what others think about you - even though they're not in your shoes, and may even have a vested interest in seeing you down.

Even the name of that concept is misleading (how is your self-worth dependent on your worth to others, unless you yourself make it so?). And here we are talking about "reality" as if human social reality is not predominantly a linguistic construct, and constantly subjected to these absolutely ridiculous abstract symbolic switcheroos, that people only fall for because they believe they have better things to do than get their thinking in order.

>You can feel whatever you want to feel.

But you can only want what you feel like wanting. So you're still trapped: desire is either intrinsic or mimetic, feelings are conditioned, yada yada.

And I'm pretty sure you can't actually "feel whatever you want to feel" - not without a Nozickian "experience machine" or years of advanced meditation practice, anyway.

That way any criticism that helps you improve your game, no matter how unpleasantly delivered, is a power up.

I say it glibly, like it's easy, but it works if one can internalize it.

It's important to recognize the ebb and flow and to be kind to yourself.

To detach emotions from work without throwing out the value of good work: attach your self-worth to something UPSTREAM "doing good work", a cause of good work, and not the work itself. You do this by realizing that the emotional attachment to your own work was never really about the work, it was what the work implied about you; the emotional brain jumps to conclusions. Good work, when you zoom in as if with a better telescope, that you are responsible, capable, well-intentioned, generous, intelligent. These can be ends in themselves—you'll disappoint yourself when you fail to live up to them, for their own sake. Those are better ends—they let you say "I DID address everything I could think of but I missed something, I'd better learn from that", rather than feeling something you missed as a vague attack against your whole being. And because, you often try to prove we are all those things—fearing you're not—but fool ourselves with things that don't really prove it—like material wealth, or attention, or good grades. And then even if you succeed you are left with some guilt: "I got the good grades but I feel like I could have done something more important..."

You can take it further: those attributes, when you zoom in further, resolve further, into a feeling that you are worthy of existing, and worthy of love. In my experience (I have felt this, but I haven't learned to live like it), feeling "worthy of love" gives you permission TO love, to be good—which again you can invert. It's the right reason to be responsible, capable, etc—all of those flow outward from something deeper rather than being ends in themselves.

Sometimes people are having a bad day. Sometimes someone has a different view of 'good' than you. Sometimes someone just got served divorce papers that morning out of the blue. And none of that you can control, or even do much to influence many times.

However, being aware that having others value the output you produce gives you things that benefit you - like help pay the rent - in combination with other factors, and is therefore important to you. But it's different.

Looking at your work and being able to judge yourself if you did a good job, is healthier, and more productive. If you're seeing that others judge the value of it differently, it's worth investigating why.

There may be something you're missing (different values, or they don't like your face, or they hate the language it's in or the style, or they haven't been laid in years, whatever).

If it is something you can adjust, it may be worth doing so. If not (or not worth it), it may be worth finding somewhere else with different values. It may also be worth adjusting your judgement of your work based on those factors, IF you think they're valid and it will improve things in your favor. Sometimes, it's worth just writing off the feedback or defending yourself, because it's coming from a toxic place from them.

But if you do this, they won't be personal attacks, because it isn't about you (as in who you actually are), because they can't know the truth there anyway. People don't work that way.

It will be about their perception of the value of what you produce to them, or their perception of you. Which is not up to you (directly), but you can influence it, and often has little to do with who you actually are and more to do with specific things you can concretely do a bit differently and change.

Does that help?

Absolutely, but:

1) not all of that value, just the value as someone who does that work. I mean, it would be crazy to think that you have no value as a dad to your three-year-old because you made some crap code design.

2) not for all possible values of "someone else". Just those someone else who have a clue about the work, and make specific, objective criticisms that are verifiably true, and who understand the context of the work: what are its requirements and non-requirements, including constraints.

3) I don't necessarily want someone else to think everything I make is of high quality; however, the right somebodies should more or less agree with me about the quality. If I make something and think it is of medium quality (for some justifiable economic reasons), then if someone thinks it is of great quality, I will regard him as a fool; but if someone thinks it is of garbage quality, I will wonder whether I might not be a fool. Ideally, we should be of one mind with everyone who understands the problem and the work. If the work is mediocre, everyone (including the author) should find it so based on some objective criteria. Everyone who understands the economic reasons for why it was made mediocre should ideally agree with that also. "Ah, I see; I would have done it the same with regard to that purpose and those requirements."

It’s easy to say ‘no, my value as a person is not due to if someone likes my work’, but emotionally we can still be in that place for many hard to address reasons.

And under stress (which we almost all are), balancing out all this to come up with ‘good enough’ and managing all the stakeholders understanding of ‘good enough’ to come to a successful outcome can be really hard and even more stressful.

So I guess what I’m saying is, if rationally someone understands, but they are still reacting that way, there is almost certainly a real reason, it just isn’t one they are able to see right now.

So maybe some yoga/excercise, or some meditation, or going outside for awhile and touching grass can help too.

Us engineer types tend to ignore emotional and physical health sometimes, especially when there is something scary or exciting going on. And we have a ton of that right now.

For me there's a big difference between being disappointed in what I've done and feeling bad for what I've done.

If I write some shitty code, which I still do after 30 years of programming, and my colleague points it out, I feel disappointed. But I don't feel bad. I fix it, try to learn from it and move on.

What you are doing is a higher goal than a PR, and detaching yourself from the minor details allows you to achieve this with greater flexibility and skill in the long term.

You have to take steps back and see subsequent bigger pictures and see what you’re doing within the context of a product, a job, a pattern of self-improvement, a fulfilling life.

So I think what people mean when they suggest detaching their self worth from their code is that they shouldn't take criticism of their code as a personal attack but as a chance to learn and grow. Hence "you are not your code": the attack isn't a direct assault on you, it's a technical argument about the actual code itself.

Take criminal behavior as an example. Someone reliant mainly on extrinsic motivation are also the same people who will not know what the right thing is when no one is looking — or worse, they are bad actors when no one is looking. Being intrinsically motivated for moral behavior requires you to really examine what is right or wrong.

This includes self-worth. I don’t think most people who are mostly extrinsically motivated realize the extent of social engineering and conditioning used so that society benefits the wealthy few .

If you take the view that our achievements are necessarily integral to our self worth this logically isn't true.

Saying "well it's not all about what we do!" is not in keeping with the conversation.

You can’t logically derive this from anything. It’s just a choice of how to see the world. “Worth” is inherently a subjective value judgement.

Most of what we do and how we think is not “logically derived” and is extremely subjective; we’re human, not Vulcan.

That is a great point... but the answer is that you should also take your accomplishments with a grain of salt.

Basically, yes, your outcomes are a function of your inputs (talent, work, etc.), but it is a very noisy function and people usually underestimate that part. Sometimes you do the right thing and fail anyway, in the sense that "the right thing" is a strategy that succeeds with probability 95%, but today just happened to be that remaining 5%. And if the next day you apply the same strategy to another task and succeed, it doesn't mean that you have improved.

If you want to base your self worth on your outcomes, at least choose the long-term trends over the short-term noise. If you usually do a good work, then the bug you made yesterday should be interpreted as an accident, rather than you being bad at what you do. And vice versa, the successfully completed project is a combination of your skills plus the good luck of not having one of those accidents today; both of them were necessary together.

> If someone’s worth is not tied to what they do, then the criminals, liars, frauds, cheaters, etc., of the world are every bit as valuable as our loved ones, idols, great contributors, etc.

Let's not judge moral character the same way we judge talent. To be a great contributor is a combination of character and talent. To be a criminal is a failure of character, but there are both talented and talentless criminals.

If failing at a project means your a failure then you’re too close.

Failure and mistakes are how you learn.

If failure and criticism are about you then you will always be defensive about and flaws, perceived or real.

So yes be proud or disappointed, but have the distance and self confidence to believe it is expected and normal to make mistakes/fail at things on the path.

As the other commenter said care about the trends and 1st derivative not the individual data points.

A great novelist would be foolish to let some editor's remarks about spelling errors and run-on commas destroy their self-worth as a writer.

If a knowledgeable critic points out problems like the plot being a series of unoriginal tropes, and the characters being paper-thin stereotypes, that has to strike at the author's self-worth as a writer. I don't see how you can get around that.

This is a very consequentialist framing of values. There are other ways of conceptualizing values, like virtue ethics and deontology, so if you're actually interested in understanding a different modality, those are keywords you can Google.

Words and emotions are easy to fake, deeds are much harder.

Being a person gives you value which cannot be take away.

It’s a philosophy, so one may reject it, but a lot of people separate their personness from their work because of the idea that each person is valuable in their own right.

If you derive self worth from results, then you could be disappointed by circumstances outside of your control.

Suppose you set a goal to make $1 million by age 30. At age 27 you're doing great and (through no fault of your own) you are struck by lightning. Because we're playing pretend let's just say your insurance doesn't cover lightning strikes and so medical bills drain a lot of your savings and you cannot continue your career and you do not become a millionare by 30.

If your goal is just the million, then you are a failure. You did not make it. If instead you derive self worth from your values, then you can still be a hard worker (or maybe your value is being self-starting, or entrepreneurial, or something else), even if you are struck by lightning.

> If someone ought not feel a negative emotion in response to doing something “bad”, by what logic can they justify feeling something positive in response to doing something “good”?

I think this section is pretty close to what I'm advocating here. "Good" and "bad" are doing a lot of legwork. What is good and what is bad? I'd wager if you asked people of different religions or ideologies or backgrounds you'd get a whole swath of answers here.

> I cannot conceive of a world view that allows one to feel proud of their accomplishments but does not require their disappointment in their shortcomings.

You might find that you attribute too much to yourself here. It can feel good when you are succeeding and sometimes the system at large is a major contributor to your accomplishments and your shortcomings. As an extreme example, I don't think that someone accomplishing little and suffering under Apartheid is worth less than someone benefiting from that system that accomplishes a lot.

> If someone’s worth is not tied to what they do, then the criminals, liars, frauds, cheaters, etc., of the world are every bit as valuable as our loved ones, idols, great contributors, etc.

To me it would depend why they commit crimes, why they lie, cheat, etc. Someone is stealing bread to feed their family that is very different from someone stealing taxes for a public project. Going back to the Apartheid example, an interracial couple would be breaking the law, and although they are criminals I would not want them to disappear for that. They could have even done horrible things to protest Apartheid and I would still not want them to disappear. If they had rotten values then sure.

First one's free: your accomplishments contribute towards your own well-being; your shortcomings are towards everyone else's disappointment. If you feel that your failures have disappointed others, you don't actually need to disappoint one more person (yourself) before you are allowed to do better. In practice, experiencing that emotional state is usually counterproductive (unless your goal is to make the others feel sorry for you). Just become aware of the failure and start looking for actionable root causes; no beating yourself up necessary.

You know, you did not even choose to be here in the first place: this world brought you forth into itself, by way of your ancestry, and imprinted its ways into the clean slate of your nervous system, by way of your formative experiences. "Perception of self" is just one of those imprints; "selfhood" is simply learned behavior.

(Even though it's next to impossible not to learn some form of selfhood, is it surprising in the slightest to say that different people's demonstrated perceptions of self can vary considerably?)

While "success" and "failure" are eminently useful notions for categorizing perceptions of feedback from the outside world, the only thing that makes these notions have any bearing at all on your perception of self is... force of habit. You have the option, and the moral right, to unlearn that habit. Nobody even asked you whether you want to be a "self"! You did not even exist when that choice was made! So, why feel responsible for whether you end up perceiving yourself as a "good enough" self? Don't you already have enough things to be responsible about, that are not entirely in your head through no fault of your own?

Expecting people to have internally consistent worldviews, or even an objective and logical perception of their own selves, is very, very idealistic. In my experience, people who are disappointed in themselves actually learned that from their parents and peers (and, increasingly, media) during the early years of their lives; it's this attitude of self-deprecation which sets them up to fail and guides them into a vicious cycle. While people who somehow avoided being taught this mentality in the first place, tend to be more resilient, not afraid to try, fail, then learn from failure and try again.

(Most people who don't kill themselves kinda-sorta end up unlearning self-deprecation and learning how to bounce back even from tremendous self-violations; but you have limited neuroplasticity, limited access to experiences, and limited time on this planet, so the sooner you start, the better. Don't wait until you can only learn internal resilience at the Pyrrhic cost of becoming an incorrigible narcissist, they're making too many of those already!)

>Furthermore, the idea of separating one’s self-worth from “what one does” does not make sense to me either. If someone’s worth is not tied to what they do, then the criminals, liars, frauds, cheaters, etc., of the world are every bit as valuable as our loved ones, idols, great contributors, etc.

You are confusing "their self-worth" with "their worth to you". Now, how could you? I think this is a really horrible, egregious, evil mistake for someone to casually make in the span of a couple sentences; I honestly can't fucking even. YET... you are still valuable to me, since you are the reason I am writing this message, you might even be receptive to my worldview, and I definitely do give a damn whether you get my point! No more, no less.

(Of course, for some reason people feel their self-worth diminished when someone points out what's basically a "syntax error" in their thinking. I think they teach 'em that in school through Pavlovian conditioning or something.)

You know, even horrible people are valuable to someone! Besides, it takes a great deal of self-worth to be a successful criminal, or even a petty liar! Especially because things can get overwhelmingly complicated really quickly, and advanced opponents can smell you doubting yourself. Narcissistic character is another case where one's self-worth and one's worth to others are grossly mismatched, to comic and often tragic effect.

What I would advise you to do (and yes, I am crazy, but I am not fucking with you), is to try listening attentively to some gangsta rap and try to put yourself in the shoes of... no, not an impoverished, radicalized African American youth; but of a well-to-do entertainer who successfully confuses the audience into believing that they are an impoverished, radicalized African American youth. And has the sheer audacity to accept more money for their controversial burlesque act, than you'll ever see for all your real hard work, that has actual, objective value for others, that everyone agrees on!

It's truly the eye-opening experience.

However, that numbness is different than being unaccustomed to taking useful critique without getting defensive. Which is absolutely a learned skill– one of the most important you learn early in art school. Someone unaccustomed to any critique, or only used to complimentary feedback will bristle at any criticism.

Someone used to constructive critique will still bristle at insults, intentional or not, so the EQ of the critic in delivering the message is also critical. The biggest enemy here are people who think that their criticism can be as rude, pedantic, or imperious as they want if the core point is valid. That might provide comparable results for the issue at hand, a) but human beings don't deserve to be treated like that, and b) it kills morale, which kills productivity, quality, retention, etc. It blows my mind how many fully-grown adults can't see that they're only quieting their own insecurities with unnecessary harshness, and that they're essentially stealing self-esteem from the team by indulging that urge.

Having people on your team with poor enough mental hygiene that they need to position themselves above someone else to feel good is a serious problem. I think it's one of the things people really mean when they talk about overly macho bro types or neckbeards.

ok firstly Comments about the individual in a CR is way out of line.

There is a massive difference between "This code will fail in <a certain way>" and "You failed <, again, like you always do>" ... The latter is out of line and should be addressed head on with a manager present or a person who will enforce it's toxicity.

Now that said, criticism of code should always been allowed. It either has certain properties or it does not. A discussion of economics (scope/timelines/applicability) are a middle ground. But either the code has a race condition or it doesnt. It's easily read (which is best judged by the reader, not the writer)... It's missing some property that is desirable.

If one takes a criticism of code as a criticism of self, that is ego crossing over to where it doesn't belong. I like to remember The bridge will either hold the load or not regardless of how one feels about it. "This wont hold 1 ton" is better information than "Have you considered what happens if you put 1 ton on this?" .. The former informs you of something that must change, the latter leaves uncertainty and obscurity where infact the answer is already known.

Being direct and being polite aren't mutually exclusive, and direct criticism doesn't have to leave out any information at all. Saying "This approach won't work under peak load because" in a code review conveys the same exact message as "Your code will collapse like a popsicle stick bridge the second we hit peak load because" during a meeting.

These types of people are so difficult to deal with and crop up in every community. The problem is that when you find a person like this in a position of power, particularly if you are new to the community, there is really not a lot you can do about it so you are either forced to a) tolerate their behavior (which will likely require setting some difficult boundaries) or b) leave. I just want to emphasize that leaving is not necessarily a sign of weakness. If the dynamics in the community are sufficiently toxic that this kind of behavior is tolerated -- or even worse, glorified -- there is very little you can do besides maybe giving an honest exit interview. But you need to have the self confidence to not let unreasonable personal attacks bring you down to the same level or make you feel as though you somehow deserve to be treated that way when you make mistakes, which we all do.

Typically the sensitivity level of feedback in my experience has encroached into things like "Don't give 10 comments on a PR, its too many and people feel bad" (regardless of the number of faults in the code).

For my project, I was building some tools that were helping me understand the problem space (which was new to me and that he fundamentally did not understand himself). In a team stand-up, which included the CTO, I shared that I had built a useful tool that was helping me and he chimes in: "I think that you just spend all of your time making tools and don't do any real work." Even if there was a conversation to be had about how I was spending my time, it was ridiculous that he was bringing this up for the first time not 1:1 but with the whole group. I resigned a few days after that interaction (which was probably at least the fourth or fifth time he'd pulled something similar in the two months I worked with them). BTW, he would never just say "you are a moron" but it was very clearly the subtext of almost all of the feedback he gave, except to the most junior people who didn't threaten him in any way.

Seven principles for making marriage work[1] - has great advice for many sorts of committed romantic relationships.

Also if he's criticizing you as you described he may want to consider talk therapy/CBT to come to an understanding of the nature of his frustrations and his inability to productively communicate them to you.

[1:] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/849380.The_Seven_Princip...

I agree with your overall statement, but I think the specific point above could be misinterpreted in a nonconstructive way. What it seems like you're trying to say is that we shouldn't just be learning how to deal with criticism by tuning it out or building up defense mechanisms against it. That I agree with. However, another interpretation that could be implied from your statement is that one should not be seeking out criticism, which is not good.

What I think OP is getting at is that learning to process criticism comes by experiencing criticism over and over again. Some of the worst responses I've seen to criticism have come from those who constantly make concerted efforts to avoid it. Understanding that you are not the sum of your output is important, but it's really hard to remember that when you're right in the thick of it. Being able to control your emotions and thoughts within that moment come from having experiencing those moments over and over again.

The point of criticism is to learn and improve, but in order for that to happen one has to be able to actually hear and process the criticism being offered. One needs to get past the emotional response to criticism in order for that to happen. The two big pieces of that are decoupling the value of what we're being criticized on from our inherent self worth, AND being able to control our emotions in the moment. The latter is really only done by having enough exposure to it, and that's the "anti-fragility" component.

The opening was that comment A was saying something about how they did <programming subject> and comment B was asking probing questions. I recognized that B was leading A towards a certain framing she had in mind(a very Uncle Bob, OO patterns are the answer kind of answer), so I injected a flat "there's nowhere else that code needs to be except one of these two places, classes have nothing to do with it."

B responded with "but surely they have to be in a manager class right?" And seeing the resistance to taking any other framing, I got more assertive and instructive in my reply, giving specific recommendations to try dispensing with OO and experiment with writing more primitive code. This was the offense, and it became an argument, which was basically a stomping because I was very prepared with sources and a rationale for why I am making that recommendation, and B fell into defenses from experience and authority, talking about numbers of lines of code and systems she had made and accusing me of speculating about her ability.

And then I said, "that's nice, but I'm the comments section." Apologized for the offense, and pointed out that she started replying to A by speculating, and had admitted as much. Finished with encouraging words for B continue writing the code that she felt works best.

She wasn't happy with this, and said I "hijacked" the thread and used a "condescending tone", but also allowed that I said interesting things.

And it's like, was it worth getting into another "arguing with strangers on the Internet" cycle? Part of why I engaged in the way I did was because I was coming off a period of answering other people's questions, so it was, at first, just one more of those.

But afterwards I realized that what I had disturbed was the belief system. The original thread was an attempt to confirm B's belief to herself: that's why it was done in a leading manner. A lot of comment threads proceed along those lines. When I just wander in and negate that, defensiveness is immediate. Saying "it can only be these two things" is only condescension if you're certain that your other way is already right. B wanted to brush it off. What I was doing was starting the "put on the glasses" fight scene in They Live.

And I think part of why I've gotten better at navigating those threads and critique generally, even if I might be overbearing or "condescending" at times, is because I can recognize when a principled defense is taking place. Good technical discussions start from a place of philosophical credibility. They don't start from norms("this way is best") and then question-beg their way into justifications. They lay out the assumptions of what's true and what's being achieved, like "eliminating a form of error"(one of the goals I outlined in that thread, and the one which ultimately made B concede) and then find conclusions inductively, deductively or abductively. Once you get away from the philosophical goal and only aim for winning the argument, you start crafting harmful rhetoric.

So the answer for me lies in philosophical training: you do have to intentionally "turn it on" to think in those terms, but it lets you be more effective around criticism, to "dance" with it and see it as a process, not a prelude to violence.

And it is much harder to deal with open comments than any one specific critic, because those are subject to mob mentality. Offend a belief the mob holds in high regard, and regardless of the principles involved, you'll just get dehumanized right away. I try not to find myself involved with that stuff anymore, but it's like, yeah, of course I have beliefs.

Another adjacent PoV is improvement, not complete, is the steady state.

What I mean is, throughout our entire schooling career we did work and turned in assignments that got graded. They were done. The work was over.

Our professions aren’t like that. There’s no done. There’s always improvement.

Therefore every piece of criticism, critique, or feedback has some data in it (sometimes layered in poorly worded phrases that can feel mean) on how to get better.

Your goal is to figure out what that data is and whether it’s valid, then act on it.

Extreme Ownership teaches a mind shift of looking at criticism and thinking of it as 'GOOD'. Criticism is an opportunity to improve.

Like anything, it's about balance. Sometimes, it really isn't anything you should be doing to fix (or anything you should change).

Yeah, perfect and ready to be exploited with no end in sight.

What are $B and $M crowds? Billionares and millionares? Do you have any personal insight into those or just read about it?

To use an analogy if you're poor disputing a $2 charge is meaningful because it might double your disposable money. But if you're rich you could absorb 1000x $2 charges per day without even seeing a difference in your first 4 digits of your wealth. (eg 4522188456 squints to the same number as 4522180456)

> You are not your lines of code.

These statements are sage advice. And while I believe them both to be correct, I personally struggle with remembering these things when it matters most.

{"You are not your lines of code", "You should feel proud when your code is good and embarrassed when your code is bad"}

Both of these things are true.

To the matter at hand, how to take criticism constructively, the key for me is bifurcating my emotional response from my logical one.

Emotional response is noted, thought about, but routed inward. Logical one is routed outward.

E.g. "This is the dumbest application of a bad sorting algorithm I've ever seen."

Emotional/inward: "That hurts. Am I a bad programmer? How did I not know this? Will I ever be a person who does know things like this? I respect the person who's telling me this: do they still respect me?"

Logical/outward: "Fair. What algorithm would you have used in this application? If you have time, can you walk me through how you would have picked it?"

People usually screw things up when they don't hold space for their own emotional response and commingle it with the logical one (e.g. manufacturing a logical justification for what is really an emotional feeling).

A great phrase for what I've been noticing about my life as well.

{"You should be okay with who you are", "You should always strive to be better"}, or {"Desire is the root of suffering", "Being passionate about a goal is the only way to fulfillment"}

Finding the nuances in these phrases and living in the bubbles where they are not actually contradictory has given me a lot of peace.

Now, what we should realize about the code isn't the thing of value. It's what the code does and how it does it, that is the runtime output and the ability to express the intent to produce that output to a programmer who hasn't seen the output or the code before or in a long time.

Criticism is the best opportunity to improve those aspects of the code you write. So it should be of equal value to you as the lines of code the criticism is addressing.

Not all criticism is valid, even well-intentioned constructive criticism. Experience teaches you which critiques to accept and which to reject.

The only way to gain that experience is to solicit criticism from others, and give it to others.

No, we are not just our code, but our artifacts are a part of us, as we are a part of them. So we should be kind when giving criticism and gracious when receiving it. Because what we choose to do with our time matters.

> You'll find that the people that break down at the slightest criticism the most are those that were criticised the most as children as well. Those that had no room for being anything other than perfect. Where value was obtained from performance.

My childhood fits this.

> "Anti-fragile attitude" when it comes to criticism is not built by tolerance

I DID learn these by tolerance!

> self-acceptance and compassion. And these values are learned early on.

I learned these LATE on, in college. I feel like it's typical for a kid, but I was insecure and very much afraid of failure. But when I encountered sustained failure despite my best efforts, it pushed my "attached to performance" ego to the breaking point. That ego broken, I was forced to decoupled my sense of self worth from my performance. I didn't do it consciously, either; it sort of just happened one day. And I literally mean on a day. I felt it the day it happened. It felt like a weight had been lifted, and I found myself unable to care as much, just all of a sudden. I wondered if it was depression, but I felt happier than I ever felt before.

That nerfed my performance somewhat, since it's no longer driven by a frantic self-flagellatory imperative to prove my self-worth, but it also made my quality of life much higher, which I consider an easy trade.

I still care about what I do, and I very much still try to do a good job. I'm just not terrorized when I don't. I feel bad when I don't, but not "I'M A PIECE OF SHIT" bad. It's a more impersonal bad. It also allows me to sincerely welcome criticism; there's no sting to it at all unless I did something colossally stupid and/or the criticism is, like, downright verbally abusive or something (which it's never been so far :p).

Self-acceptance and compassion can only develop when you have a place where you feel physically, socially and emotionally safe as a base you can return to when you need to re-center.

Safety gives you permission to take risks (financially, emotionally, physically, socially) by having a place to regroup.

This is something many teams misunderstand or are completely unaware of. Demonstrating understanding and compassion to one's colleague's will increase their abilities to communicate and work collaboratively.

Additionally, physical health issues and pain can take away our feeling of safety, and sitting on our butts all day is REALLY not healthy. But it's hard to notice when it creeps up on us.

I think you actually are, in a very real sense. Someone else would have written different lines of codes. The lines of code are a function of yourself, an inherent part of you. Criticizing the lines of code criticizes that part of you. You can’t criticize a novel without implicitly criticizing its author. When we criticize an LLM’s output, we are typically criticizing the LLM. Perceiving criticism of one’s own work as something personal is only natural, and logical.

Now, if the criticism is of a honest mistake, you can learn from that, and own the mistake – show responsibility for it by acknowledging it and correcting it. Of course, that presupposes that you agree that it was a mistake.

Often things aren’t that clear-cut. There can be genuine differences of opinion and of judgement. Of course, one is biased towards one’s own work. It helps to be aware of that bias. It also helps to think in terms of picking your battles.

If you don’t quite agree with a criticism, it can also help to give yourself a chance to change your mind a bit. Maybe later you’ll actually mostly agree with it. And that later changed you isn’t the former you that was criticized. Win-win!

I disagree on the strongest terms. You need to work with a mindset to your own growth an evolution. It was me who wrote these lines of code an hour ago, but I would not have known to write them a year ago and I will know better than to write them like this in another year's time. Possibly I wouldn't even write them like that now, having thought about them for an hour.

I am not a perfect coder, some Omnipotent god. Everything I write is a tradeoff of my current set of knowledge and the pressures I'm under and is therefore inherently flawed.

If someone criticise my code it's because they either know more than me, in which case I have learned why I shouldn't have done that and will adapt for the future, or it's because they know less than me and I haven't clearly explained the tradeoffs in which case I have learned that I need to express myself more clearly and will adapt that for the future.

(Of course it might just be because they didn't bother to read my commit message but that's a different problem)

If you believe that your coding ability is an inherent part of you, then they are not different. If you believe that your coding ability is an ever-changing attribute of you but not core to who you are, then they are very different.

If x is 5, then x + 5 and 10 are the same thing. If x is 3, then x + 5 and 10 are not the same thing.

A good question to ask is which model is more useful, or which model is more likely to lead to various outcomes you might want. "Me=my code" is pretty good for producing top coders and winning competitive situations. It also tends to produce burnout and assholes. You aren't stuck with always using one or the other, either. A lot of people start with "me=my code" when younger, then switch partially or fully to "my code=my code" later when their initial model starts leading to conflict and inefficiencies in a system larger than just one or a few developers. (Or they start finding value in non-coding pursuits.)

That was definitely not my intent, and I'll take that on board as an area to improve on :)

I disagree that the code I write is "part of me." It expresses a series of ideas that I had. And every therapeutic modality I have tried would have failed if I didn't have the implicit understanding that I have something like a soul or an essence that stands apart from my thoughts and feelings. My thoughts are just random noise in the grand scheme of things, including this sentence.

I can't stand the way that some people write, but that doesn't amount to a criticism of them as a person, unless I choose to make it about that.

I don't understand not feeling bummed out by that type of critique. Sure it's not about you as a person or your values, but dang that sucks.

When I read "I can't stand the way some people write", I get a similar sort of feeling. The intention is not that it is a harsh statement, but to me it's very harsh (although not on the same level as the example I wrote).

To me, this highlights the problem with criticism and why the thread is a bit divisive. It's a gap between intention and perception with different end results based on how feedback is perceived.

That's what your code is. It's a picture of your thoughts at a particular time, constrained by the process of translation onto the medium on which it is being viewed. Some part of you is in there, but the thing itself is not you and it doesn't make sense to view it as a completely accurate representation of yourself. You got caught thinking with your mouth open, oops. Just try again.

The attitude of desiring to learn is what keeps me sane, but I've learned that feedback like "X is bad" often comes from someone's subjective experiences in a particular situation. They then take that and apply it globally. It's hard to have conversation with such strong opinions.

Having a trusted coworker who has a disagreement, followed by a healthy conversation will result in either the change they want, the original staying, or a new solution that's better. Growth can come from all 3, depending on the mindset going in.

I think you're closest when you say "A high criticism tolerance is learned by understanding that ones self worth is not attached to output or delivery"

The compassion part is unnecessary.

Any criticism you take personally is ultimately a fictitious story you're choosing to accept about your identity. We are the ones choosing to take an event like a comment, apply a label of snarky, and allow it to set our emotions in the moment.

The snarky comment itself has no objective meaning. It only takes on meaning when we decide to interpret it negatively. We could just as easily screen the comment for actual valuable feedback, and if there is, implement it. And now you have a win. How smart of you, you should feel good about that.

The real approach is rising above and seeing things for what they really are, and seizing opportunities to look at things differently for an optimal outcome.

I think it is parents job to introduce small disappointments for children. This way they learn to handle larger disappointments. I think we need to teach ourselves to handle criticism in the same way, in small doses.

About not seeing it as criticism, I am not completely sure what you suggest. But I have analogy with improvisation theatre. There people celebrate mistakes, because fear of mistakes is what blocks you from improvising.

So instead of changing the name (to something else from "mistake") to overcome the fear, the fear is met head-first by celebrating mistakes. Similarly, I think the name "criticism" is not important, and if you can overcome the negative connotation for the word for you personally, there is no reason to change the word.

It took me a long time to realize this applied to me. I don't ever remember explicitly being criticised as a child but I reached adulthood with a wicked need for perfection and "achievement" and a subconscious aversion to criticism. I still find it hard to feel valid and valuable in the world other than through work. But all of these behaviors have undoubtedly held me back in work and relationships.

This only works if you truly believe that you are accepted by your team at all stages of your development, and if the feedback is delivered with the intention of helping you grow.

If someone disagrees with anything in the code, you can point them either to a requirement that would have to change if it were done differently, or else some documented best practice (whether in-house or some famous external one) would be violated.

Have a reason for everything. Why is there a linear search in that function? Because the number of items is at most ten, and not expected to ever exceed around fifteen; moreover, the function is called only a dozen times, on first boot after a firmware upgrade.

Also, be the most stern critic you can be, of your own code, criticize it yourself and fix everything, so you don't leave much for anyone else.

1) Who will see it? What will be the consequences? If no one, then look past the delivery and consider just the content.

2) Use it as useful feedback and information that you otherwise might have never gotten. Consider how many people may have thought similar things but were too nice to say anything. Finally someone spoke up and told you what others were thinking. Then you will come to regard the (private) exposing of a flaw with appreciation!

3) Treat it as you would any focus group, it is just one data point. Sometimes the frustrating thing is when the criticism is wrong and is just a product of how things are done locally. If you are un a full-time job, just embrace how things are done. If your solution serves many other clients, you may have to file it among other priorities.

When you start to focus on the work and the outcome, you don’t focus on criticism as a personal attack, even if it was meant as one you extract the actual usefulness from it.

You are not your work. You can write incredibly crappy code and still be a fine person. You can write beautiful, elegant code and be a terrible person. Separating your work/code from your self-worth is hugely important.

They are lines of code until you reveal them to the world. Then they are part of the world. When someone else improves them (or tries to improve them) you must rejoice that the ideas you have given the world have attracted enough attention to be criticized and improved!

Only by keeping the code private would the criticism be criticism against you. Once you distribute the code, the only truly negative thing someone can do, from your point of view, is to ignore the code.

That’s my point of view anyway. Elsewhere in the thread someone commented positively on your self awareness and in parting I must echo them.

Agreed. And nobody's lines of code are perfect.

As I mentioned in my other post - I make things that I find enjoyable, and while I am not 'numb' to criticism, I just dont let criticism to affect my personal Mortar in the foundations of who I feel I am.

Our industry doesn't have many standards, and it's not nearly as objective as some think. And often criticism isn't intended to improve an outcome: it's intended to bring others' in line with the critic's view of how it should be done.

All this to say, I'd just add to your comment that one must also develop the ability to discern when a critic is identifying a true mistake and when they are simply parroting a fad or injecting their subjective beliefs into the review.

Maturity means that you can accept criticism that is intended to help you improve. Making you aware of an issue or directing you towards a better solution can make your code or product a better one.

Simple insults thrown from the 'peanut gallery' should just be ignored. If you have built something using a particular language or framework on a particular platform; you should expect those who don't like those things to throw in their two cents without even trying to understand the problem you are trying to solve.

I've found managing situations like this to be the hallmark of a good architect / high-level engineer. I really admire people who are able to think quickly on their feet and push back against people who push for ignorant or unnecessary changes. And it is something I am not good at.

I've taken to silently fixing peoples' mistakes as to avoid these kinds of discussions. While I'd really like to say, our architecture did not force you to push broken code into master hours before you went on vacation, my (agreeable) personality prevents that.

Whether it is a design pattern, deployment strategy, or choice of language, if your argument has no technical advantage then you are just expressing your taste preference. This is where someone will likely call you out by asking, "are we discussing technology or ice cream flavors?"

I'll steal this and see how it turns out.

Exactly. And if that boundaries get violated repeatedly in the same situation (especially by the same people), it is fine to release that anger in a controlled way. I've come to the conclusion that some folks haven't left the state where they sometimes need a (vocal) pat on their hand to realize they crossed boundaries they shouldn't cross. If you can play that game, congrats.

Also, do not swallow your anger. Find a non-destructive, non-harmful way to release it. As anger is a physical reaction, the easiest way is to go for a walk, ride your bike or whatever. Whatever floats your boat should be fine.

Also people who criticize people make a mistake kind of.

Always criticize the code, not the person.

Now sure it depends on the type of criticism in question. Finding a bug or other practical problems obviously isn't, but talking shit about a way something is arbitrarily set up that the author thought was really neat would absolutely be.

This line of thinking also reminds me of how every time some actor or director or whatever is implicated in some scandal, their work is also tainted forever instead of being taken at face value for what it is. Can we separate the artist from their art? Is it even possible? I doubt it.

There's always external influence, but if you're involved you obviously added something and in most cases it can be scrutinized on its own merits.

Code is made to be efficient in a compagny, it's not "personal" or here to make you have feelings. So if you can't discuss efficiency because you'll hurt people it's just bad. If you do art, you create art with respect to your own sensibility emotions so yeah be weary of criticizing someone's art.

As much effort and ego you put in it, it will still suck in some way.

You wrote some bad code. You are not a bad code writer.

And he loved to get "artistically creative" with "elegant variation" of variable names and naming conventions, permuting and mutating them at every level, and making up cute unique abbreviations by randomly dropping characters to save a few keystrokes of typing, then spicing it up with whimsical nonsense like "aardvark" and "pancake", instead of boringly predictable consistent correctly spelled descriptive big-endian names like I prefer. (He claimed that made it easy to grep the code.)

He would even alternate between CamelCase and lowerCamelCase and snake_case and Snake_That_Ate_A_Camel_Case and UPPER_CASE and runtogetherlowercase in the same fucking variable name, occasionally throwing in the random "sam_" and "_SAM" prefixes and suffixes for good measure!

He also liked hard wiring the path of his home directory into code, of course. He was like a territorially possessive dog pissing on all the trees and fire hydrants he could find, and all the code he wrote sucked.

That made it extremely hard to separate the "arteest" from their "work", and not to criticize the person as well as the code. But at least it was easy to tell at a glance which code needed to be tossed out and rewritten.

Please don't be a Sam! There are some people who do deserved to be criticized as much as their code.

Elegant Variation (which is a terrible idea despite its fancy sounding name):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation

>Elegant variation is a writer's substitution of "one word for another for the sake of variety". The term was introduced in 1906 by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler in The King's English. In their meaning of the term, they focus particularly on instances when the word being avoided is a noun or its pronoun. Pronouns are themselves variations intended to avoid awkward repetition, and variations are so often necessary, that they should be used only when needed. The Fowlers recommend that "variations should take place only when there is some awkwardness, such as ambiguity or noticeable monotony, in the word avoided".

Big-Endian Naming Molds, Code Smells, Smurfing:

Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names can make code easier to read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7w2lKG8zWM

>Name molds let you structure variable names to maximize the chance of different programmers guessing the same name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31472523

DonHopkins on May 22, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names c...

I like to use "big-endian" naming molds (love that term!) to define sets of names that when you alphabetize them place related variables next to each other. (i.e. in a completion menu or browser.)

For example, left_foo and right_foo are little-endian, since the least significant word comes first, so they'll be a long distance away from each other in an alphabetized list.

But foo_left and foo_right are big-endian, since foo is more significant than left or right. So they will appear one after the other in an alphabetized list.

Common suffix words are _x _y _z or _min _max, or _left _right _top _bottom, of even singletons like _enabled _loaded _error etc.

But when you combine multiple dimensions together in names, you need to think of which dimensions are more significant, based on how the variables are used, so use foo_x_min foo_x_max, if the positions are important, or foo_min_x foo_min_y, if the ranges are more important.

Sometimes it's hard to decide or ambiguous, so just try to be predictable and the same as all the other code. Think of which variables should appear closest to each other in an alphabetical list.

And avoid middle-endian or random-endian (or sentence-grammar-order-endian) like the plague. A variable name should probably not be a grammatically correct sentence.

Another really annoying linguistic naming smell is "smurfing," where all of class Smurf's instance variables have smurf_ prefixes. Or where all the classes, methods, or instance variables have an "xyz_" prefix where "xyz" is the name of the project or library. Arrgh!!!

SnowHill9902 on May 22, 2022 | prev [–]

Agreed. When dealing with real values, it’s favorable to explicit the units: weight_lb, length_cm.

DonHopkins on May 22, 2022 | parent | next [–]

Yes, explicit unit suffixes are good smurfs!

Also: eschew Bill and Ted's Excellent Postfix "_not", which inverts the meaning of the variable name. That's a most totally bogus code smell, dude.

If you are angry, it is difficult to discern what are the truths. So it is useful to approach criticism both from good and bad intentions both in the same way. In other words, by default, if you get angry, try to figure out what in the criticism makes you angry.

In the professional world, giving feedback with tact and respect for the contributor is what we get paid for and enables a team to contribute to the company’s success.

If someone on the team doesn’t feel like they’re treated with respect, even when their work needs improvement, it doesn’t matter whether the feedback was given with good or bad intentions.

Of course, the dangerous part is that you may learn the wrong thing. Extracting constructive feedback from criticism that was not intended to be constructive requires a certain level of self-confidence and psychological safety that's only possible when it's an unusual event rather than a continuous drag on your self-worth.

If there is a person consistently giving hurtful feedback and I would be in a position to get the person fired, I would do it. (And I have done it.) And I would not work in such a work environment. At least 50% of programming work in typical organizarions is about getting along with people.

But I have found myself in environments where I needed to tolerate this to a degree. And the only thing you can ultimately change is your own attitude. If you can see that hurtful criticism may be even more truthful than other criticism, it helps to develop the right attitude.

AIUI, CBT's primary method is to convince you to pause between feeling and acting, so that you can ask yourself if you have made an accurate assessment of reality and can plan an appropriate response.

(Easier to say than to embrace, of course.)

Fully agree. I tell people, if you cannot be humble about your code, you're going to deter yourself and others. It's okay to admit you may have "screwed up" (mistakes happen to everyone, even in production) the big thing to do is learn what was wrong, and if there's any steps you could take moving forward to avoid that mistake, the person commenting on your mistake probably made the same mistake, and worse it made it into production and now its ingrained in them.

Developers become adamant to prevent issues they or fellow team mates have ran into, even seasoned developers run into issues. Hell, even architects, and I've seen CTO's do the dumbest decision making.

It's about doing the best you can, and helping others to do the same. Critique on your code isn't critique about you as a person. Sometimes personal statements can leak in and that's different. I find that for the most part, critiques are only about the code, and it's the author that turns things personal which is where any argument is already lost.

This doesn't mean you have to agree with a given assessment, and they don't have to agree with your approach. As opposed to some other comments on this post, I will say that I think the best way to learn how to deal with it is to just keep working, and when you do feel yourself getting emotional, take a step back and review. You rarely are on the spot to respond at that moment, especially for typical PR processes and feedback. Try to put yourself in the mindset to assume at first you are wrong, and second that you are not interpreting the message as intended. Interpret the best possible view of the person and the message sent.

It's really hard to put yourself in that mindset, and it definitely takes practice, time and experience. The best thing that you can do from the start, is stay quiet, step away for a moment, and re-evaluate before responding if you feel emotional.

I’ll also add that journaling is an absolute game changer in terms of actually debugging/thinking through problems.

Meditation = “give this a minute or day to simmer”

Journaling = “now that I’ve cooled down, what are my actual thoughts on this matter”

I’ve been astounded on dozens of occasions to learn what my own thoughts really are, for the first time, by seeing them on paper. I.e. it subjectively feels like I don’t think the thought then write it, but instead I write it, read it, then think it.

One of the core techniques is to visualize the emotion as another person as you try to talk to it and discover more about what it is you're feeling, eventually coming to a strong connection with the feeling. It's been an epiphany trying to process emotions this way for me.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Focusing-Clinical-Practice-Essence-Ch...

I have found meditation to help me to stay calm in situations, and even if I am about to get angry, to become aware of it in situations, so I can remove myself from situation before acting. And also to calm down more quickly. When you can process the criticism from a better place in yourself.

Also, I have found tai chi to be have similar effect on me.

I myself started meditating on my own, when I was 11/12 so that is definitely an age, when you can do it serious.

My own kids (< 5) are too small yet, that I would do serious meditating with them, but some sort of pre exercises, like just sitting still in nature and observing, do work since the beginning.

Don't push them obviously. Rather give them a chance, to explore mindfulness and consciousness with you. I can also recommend Tai Chi/Qui Gong as an more active path towards it.

I am also not a fan of working with "you are an idiot and you are doing it all wrong" people. Even if they are technically 100% correct, they should have shown me some respect by having a conversation to double check their assumptions. I maybe physically robust, but I still enjoy being transported by a bus with well working suspension.

However, an out here is "time and patience". There is no way to know what all other people have on their plate, if they are tired or preoccupied with personal matters and so on. If they are being unreasonable, it's certainly worth keeping in mind that it may not be because of you.

> We can think of a tree as a dynamic system in equilibrium with respect to the forces of gravity. Tree growth takes advantage of horizontal symmetry around a vertical axis as a way to distribute gravitational forces so that the downward force due to gravity on one side of the tree is balanced by the downward force of gravity on the other side of the tree. When the wind blows, the new force acting on the dynamic system of a tree responding to gravity temporarily shifts its current state, as mea-sured by the tree’s position in three-space, to a nonequilibrium configur-ation, and when the wind dies down the tree returns to its equilibrium configuration, just as models of linear systems with stable equilibrium points indicate how a dynamic system responds to a transient impulse. Let us imagine the tree as being represented by a vertical, straight line ..

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.

The most common way I've seen this done is by becoming numb and not caring at all or thinking others are worth less than you so you shouldn't listen to them. Not options I'd choose for myself.

I used to work in a customer facing support job, so I learned some strategies to keep cool from that.

I will strongly disagree that numbing is useful. I grew up extremely emotionally numb and distant. Looking back it never simplified things.

Numbing to me implies not caring, while detachment from your views can be born from caring about improving.

If you want to improve, this likely involves shedding some convictions you hold too close.

-

To the OP - "Dont give a F"

I make quirky and weird shit that pleases ME. (physical things, like weird bike products, stuff out of leather, etc...)

Some people find them odd, or "why are you doing that?" -- BECAUSE I ENJOY IT, I dont give AF how you feel about it.

Going through that process over and over again has been incredibly helpful in my professional life, even though most of the criticism I receive is rarely structured like those juries. The first thing I learned is that it's rarely useful to try and refute or respond to the criticism directly in the moment. If that's your instinct, then chances are you aren't fully thinking through the criticism and responding from a more emotional state, which is not good. The key is to try and actually listen (rather than "shutting down"), remember the key points to process later, and to let the person offering the criticism know that you've acknowledged it.

Second is to realize that nothing is perfect. There is always room for improvement, things that you couldn't foresee, and things you simply didn't have time for. Obviously, the bigger those things are the more concerned you should be, but as your work becomes more and more refined, the criticisms become about smaller and smaller aspects of whatever you've done. The goal is not to get zero criticisms of your work, but to have the criticism that you do receive be about less and less important elements.

Third is that someone will always have something to say. Interpret that in a number of ways. If you're getting a code review, you're soliciting someone's opinion or your development process is dictating it. People will come up with criticism because that's what's being asked of them, and even if it's "perfect", responding with nothing makes it seem like they're not doing what they should. People like to offer criticism because it makes them feel important; they see a "flaw" you didn't, even if they don't really understand the totality of what you did. And while its disappointing to say, some people will criticize you for personal reasons, be it against you directly or because they think they stand to gain something by doing it.

Ultimately, you have to decide what is worth listening to and what is not. If nothing is ever worth listening to, then that's something that's likely more on you than the criticism you're receiving. It's also very tempting to discount criticism from certain sources because of past issues with that source. Process each criticism from them in the same way, regardless of the past, because you never know when they actually might have something worth listening to.

I agree 100% with this. Art majors (depending on the school) go through much the same process, with the added bonus that artists can be even more capricious. E.g., "blue is totally the wrong color for that."

Filing the burrs off of your ego is often a good thing. There is an issue with some people who are just not structurally fit for that sort of thing, where the slightest criticism can make them collapse into a heap of self-loathing and depression. Discretion and discernment are important so that you don't break a fellow human. So the flip side is that being a part of critique juries is also training in how to give criticism, which is an important skill in and of itself.

Programming, especially in the open source world, tends to be a very solitary endeavor. It's quite akin to art in that way. And programmers tend to spend a lot of time up in their heads. And they tend to be rather blunt about their opinions. Getting some time in the reviewer and reviewee seat is useful.

That's a little of what I was getting at with some of the points above. Tons of criticism is just plain subjective. How do you evaluate the validity of someone else's subjective decision? The ultimate answer is that you can't if your response to it is to flip the table and leave the room.

>There is an issue with some people who are just not structurally fit for that sort of thing, where the slightest criticism can make them collapse into a heap of self-loathing and depression.

I agree, but I think that in and of itself is a bit of a different problem. A key aspect of the modern human condition is being able to deal with criticism. If the slightest bit of it will "make you collapse" then that's a strong indication that you need some professional help to learn how to deal and process things.

>Discretion and discernment are important so that you don't break a fellow human. So the flip side is that being a part of critique juries is also training in how to give criticism, which is an important skill in and of itself.

I don't disagree that teaching people how to criticize will help have that criticism be better structured, less aggressive, and more constructive overall, but the reality is that we can't expect everyone to have "the proper training". There absolutely were jurors that I had that were more about tearing you down than trying to help improve. Dealing with those people was a learning process in and of themselves.

>And programmers tend to spend a lot of time up in their heads. And they tend to be rather blunt about their opinions. Getting some time in the reviewer and reviewee seat is useful.

This points to the social nature of giving and receiving criticism. There needs to be emotional awareness from both perspectives. Programmers, as a generalization, tend to be more anti-social than other professions. A key aspect of social interactions is empathy; being able to see things from others' perspectives. When I look back at some of poorest delivered criticisms or responses to criticisms I've experienced in my professional career, they've come from the most anti-social developers.

Bluntness can have two interpretations, being straight to the point and/or not going into details. "This is poorly structured" is blunt, but doesn't attack or make things personal. "This is crap" is just as blunt, but has a far more negative connotation and interpretation to it. Neither is all that great of a criticism if they're not expanded on or explained.

Even muscle strengthening seems to require minor injuries to the tissue. Tougher but demaged.

You're thinking scar tissue, which analogously would be a maladaptive response to criticism (inflating ego, projecting fault).

Muscle strengthening doesn't cause permanent damage unless you overdo it.

Compare this to true trauma to the tissue, which results in scarring. Scar tissue may be "tougher" (less pliable) but it's not contributing to additional work. A better analogy might have been that broken bones grow back stronger, though even that requires that they are set right and have an appropriate amount of recovery time, which to continue the analogy, might be therapy needed to not be so brittle in the first place.

From what I recall, exposure to environmental antigens as a child helps train the immune system to not go off on them later (as allergies).

Exposure to any particular disease is only a positive in your adaptive immune system response to that particular disease (and may cause problems such as antibody-dependent enhancement of related diseases, as seen in Dengue, and some Flu infections). For particular diseases such as chicken pox it's better to get them as a child as they have worse symptoms if first caught as an adult. For other diseases I don't know that it matters much. It's probably best to just never catch them at all. And then for diseases such as measles, you don't want to catch them ever (at least before vaccination); definitely not after you've caught other diseases.

https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2020/Covid19-immunity-Yasser

> Does our immune system get stronger with every infection we fight off?

> To answer this question, let’s first discuss the two types of the immune system. Our immune system is composed of two arms, the innate and adaptive immune systems. The innate immune system acts fast (in minutes) after it recognizes a pathogen and, in most cases, eradicates the invading pathogens. During this process, the cells of the innate immune system, and their derived immune mediators/proteins, also activate the cells of the adaptive immune system which then develop memory immune responses toward these pathogens. Therefore, upon reinfection, the intensity of the innate immune system remains the same. In contrast, the adaptive immune response is much stronger than the initial exposure to these pathogens.

> So, to answer this question, our immune system doesn’t get stronger with every infection but the response of the adaptive immune system is much faster and stronger upon reinfection.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/10/how-measles-w...

> Reporting today in Science, the researchers show that the measles virus wipes out 11 percent to 73 percent of the different antibodies that protect against viral and bacterial strains a person was previously immune to — anything from influenza to herpesvirus to bacteria that cause pneumonia and skin infections.

> So, if a person had 100 different antibodies against chicken pox before contracting measles, they might emerge from a case of measles with only 50, cutting their chicken pox protection in half. That protection could dip even lower if some of the antibodies lost are potent defenses known as neutralizing antibodies.

This is counterintuitive but actually there is raw science to back the opposite fact up. I'm not joking.

The more delusional you are as in the less ability you have to take and accept criticism the more likely you are to be successful. There is a positive correlation for this verified by science.

It gels with my anecdotal experience too. At the top end of success those guys are the most delusional and least accepting of criticism, for example Elon musk or Steve jobs, etc. Etc.

But even on the lower end of the spectrum, senior engineers it's there too. For example people who claim they are able to unbiasedly accept criticism are often the people who are worst at it.

The reason for this is not any sort of deliberate emotional reaction or anything like that. But rather because the brain actively deludes you from seeing the complete truth. It pushes people to construct artificial scaffolds of logic to uphold their existing beliefs.

Senior engineers are not immune to it nor are they better. What determines the senior role has a lot of factors and definitely not all the factors are related to the actual formal senior rank. A lot of it is luck, time, politics and other bullshit that gets people that rank.

Everyone builds these ideals about their identity, their rank, and their engineering ability. The reality is that a lot of it is delusional. By deluding yourself it becomes easy to include other people in your delusion as well and that's how a lot of hierarchies work.

Not saying their aren't competent people out there, but don't fall for the false belief that a rank like "senior engineer" conveys a certain level of emotional maturity to accept criticism.

If the 'delusion' is useful and produces better output, then is it really a delusion?

Perhaps you could share this verifiable science?

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 reply in a kind manner in turn. In general you get out of a conversation what you put into it, so add kindness.

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. Instead of wasting brain cycles getting more angry as you write the perfect zinger, let it go and you’ll forget about it soon enough. Focus on feeling better, never on making the other person feel worse.

If you do have to reply, don’t do so immediately. Let it marinate and respond when your initial feeling has subsided. That allows you to get some emotional distance between yourself and your work, thus seeing (and fixing) the problem in the thing not yourself. Waiting has the secondary effect that another person may reply in the interim, shifting the burden away.

When you feel bad, stop to think. Observe your own reaction and calmly try to realise why you’re feeling that way and what’s your goal. The introspection alone can make you see that the situation is unimportant and thus taking it personally is disproportionate.

The first few times might be hard but eventually it becomes second nature as you adapt and find the approach that works best for you.

>When you feel bad, stop to think. Observe your own reaction and calmly try to realise why you’re feeling that way and what’s your goal. The introspection alone can make you see that the situation is unimportant and thus taking it personally is disproportionate.

I think those two are the core of the good advice. I'm also quite bad at not getting emotional by criticism and this is what I usually do too.

I would add that it's better to throw away the idea that "after some training, eventually you won't react badly to criticism" is something you'll achieve. Some people (like me) didn't really stop reacting badly to criticism, but just found a system/coping mechanism to channel that emotional reaction in a healthy way.

Another practical advice is to write down the criticism you got when you got it. Even if you got the criticism over text, the practice of writing (summarizing) the criticism received when you're under your emotional reaction will slow down your thought-process (you write slower than you think) and you'll also have material (something you wrote) later when you're more calm. Re-reading the criticism later from the person that gave it to you, might stir the negative emotions again and start a vicious cycle, so something written by you is a good intermediate to stop that, and detach the message from the person.

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.

Most of the time if someone is being intentionally rude on the internet, they're also being a troll. Don't feed the animals!

I would also add: consider the counterfactual where you didn't even make that work. Surely making a honestly flawed work beats the heck out of not even accomplishing that work after all.

Lots of other works are flawed, in various areas of human activity. Yes, it sucks when it happens but the only way we as individuals or as a species move forward is by concluding tasks that are not critically flawed - they don't need to be perfect.

Only addition that I might make is that if the reviewer has taken the time to deeply understand your problem space and reply, they have given their time and energy and in a very real sense that is a gift. (Depending on their motivation of course - maybe they do it to lord it over others... but that is not your problem - it's their problem), I try to be thankful and this for me also contributes to the sense of togetherness in a 'us vs the problem' sense.

Also wanted to specifically comment on

> When you feel bad, stop to think. Observe your own reaction and calmly try to realise why you’re feeling that way and what’s your goal. The introspection alone can make you see [...]

That sounds very close to mindfulness meditation - or any kind of meditation really. In my opinion that is also a great way yo get better understanding of oneself and it can help improve quality of life overall a lot.

This works well in professional settings, but falls apart in certain online communities. How do you deal with people that don't have positive intentions, but actually have the precise opposite intentions, i.e. they want to attribute any perceived problem with your work as it meaning you are a bad programmer. Not taking that personally is far tougher.

If you’re part of an online community where bad intentions are the norm, I’d recommend moving on to another. Why spend your time with a group that frequently makes you feel bad on purpose?

> How do you deal with people that don't have positive intentions, but actually have the precise opposite intentions

You move on to the third paragraph. Either ignore it (that can be tough, but the sooner you let it go and continue with your day the easier it becomes) or respectfully point out the problem. Try to have them not take it personally lest they become defensive and double down. The goal is deescalation. Speak specifically to the content of their message instead of them as a person. Use a variation of assuming good intentions: assume they are normally a good and reasonable person who is having a bad day and lashed out once. Empathise. Give them an out to apologise for their behaviour and they often will.

When that doesn’t work, reread your reply. Was it respectful and imbued with good intentions? Is it clear the goal was to improve the discourse? If not, learn from it and try again in another situation. But if you feel you did the best you could and the other party is being intransigent, let it go. Feel good about your effort. Even if you were unsuccessful with that particular individual, other people reading the exchange may take something positive out of it.

Be sure to never reply in anger. That only generates more conflict and ruins your day further. There’s no point to that.

Indeed, that's precisely what I ended up doing after what has been ~3 years of trying to make the community better.

What's somewhat interesting is that it seems the community in question went downhill as soon as the pandemic started, the underlying issue was a lack of serious moderation and an unwillingness of the powers that be to introduce it and while that was okay for many years, once a critical mass of people with bad intentions arrived the environment just became toxic because they were largely unchecked.

If folks are not providing constructive feedback there’s no reason to pay any attention to what they’re saying.

(The downside of internet fame to anyone is that you will attract far, far more of these people, regardless of what you do.)

Yeah... I don't consider myself to have "internet fame" but I suppose I'm well known enough in certain large communities that I've managed to attract these people. I've ended up leaving the communities where these people are active, but I have seen evidence that they continue to spout lies about me there. I often wonder if people just take what they say at face value. The urge is to stay in those communities and correct the record at every opportunity to defend my reputation, but that takes a huge amount of effort and sanity to deal with. Is the advice in these situations to simply ignore and forget?

In the first case, the community is healthy. In that case, someone spouting lies about someone who isn't even there anymore is going to look rather odd, especially if you had a history and a track record there. It has a good chance of not getting much traction, and it might get some pushback from the community. In this case you have a fair chance of being able to successfully leave your reputation in the community's hands.

In the second case, the community is toxic. The lies are believed, and even amplified by others. Your reputation there is toast. You could go back and fight for your reputation, but if you did, you'd be likely to lose, and the attempt would eat up your time and emotional stability.

In either case, just walking away and ignoring it is about as good a strategy as you can find.

Note well: I am a random nobody on the net. I don't have a reputation online, except under pseudonyms, so I am talking about what I do not actually know. (Yes, I am aware of one person online who defamed my real-life identity. They were obscure enough, and their rant was obviously unhinged enough, that I felt no actual harm from just ignoring it.)

There it is: the false dichotomy of “good” vs “bad” programmers.

No, programmers exist on a multidimensional spectrum and performance is contextual.

I know enough that I can tell if it's preference (say, linting style) or misguided (for example there's some wrong advice floating around that multiple returns are inherently bad) or something I actually missed, and in that last case usually how much of an issue it actually is and whether it's a new topic to learn or something I forgot or something I deliberately didn't bother with.

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.

I have a cantrip these days: "I'm going to take a minute and process that."

It can mean a lot of things, under the hood, and I've had to repeat it a few times in some conversations, but overall, tremendously successful statement.

My work is a result of circumstance, like, what my mood was when I did it, how well I know the particular domain, if I've seen solutions to similar problems before, what tools were available and understandable to me at the time.

In other words, the quality of my work depends much more on what the particular task was, than on some inherent quality within myself.

So, try not to let it influence me either way, to not feel some unjustified pride that I made something "difficult", or shame that I couldn't manage to do something "easy".

One liberating tactic I employ, is that I clearly announce when I've messed up, and I'll be the first to do it, and usually with a joke.. "Yeah, so that amazing queue we got up and running last week, I took the liberty to totally mess that up, I learned a lot about how not to do it, I'll eventually learn how to do it right, no worries, I'm working on it." This takes the pressure off, people know it's broken, who broke it, and who's fixing it, and they expect that I come for help if I need it. One thing I don't do, is say sorry, I'm not sorry, this is my job, we do software development, we break stuff, we make errors, and I'm not sorry about it.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_changes_in_Star_War...

I do a lot of micro experiments, most of which don't work. But I've gotten better and faster at performing these experiments over time. The more of those I make, the more I learn, the more suitable the solution can be.

When an author makes edits on a draft, those are steps to a finished product. We're similar: our steps result in learning, and that's the most essential element of a good product.

Watching this about a year ago was eye opening to me and I wished I'd found this video when I started studying in college!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52lZmIafep4

Each individual piece of work separately, sure.

In aggregate, anything that doesn't average out probably points at something to work on learning.

I will be the first to apologize for messing up something for someone else, or giving bad advice, or for taking a decision which lead other people down a wrong path. I'll also apologize, as soon as possible, and in front of others if they're there, if I said something that could be misunderstood or sounded harsh or brash. (Though, that really does not happen very often at all). I believe in modesty and dignity, and apologizing is part of that.

I can explain better with examples.

"Sorry for wasting your time with this mistake," feels very formal and isn't really applicable in most cases. It would be more appropriate if, say, I'd made a mistake, not owned up to it, and the lack of accountability has a negative impact.

"Ah shit, that's totally broken. Sorry, that was my bad!" is more what I'd do and it's a lot less formal. I'm not really apologising or feeling any remorse. I didn't do anything immoral, here. What I'm really saying with "sorry" is "I am accountable for making this mistake and I will commit to fixing it."

I hope this helps clarify the different meanings.

Most mistakes are only mistakes in retrospect, but at the time seemed like good or at least reasonable ideas. I don't apologize if I've done my due diligence at the time.

And I'm Canadian, saying sorry is like our favourite pastime :)

That said, sometimes I'll convey that I wished I had seen things better in the past, and sometimes that comes out like an apology (eg:sorry folks, I wish I had known this tech was totally unsuitable here).

I do apologize for mistakes due to laziness, shortcuts, emotionally charged decisions and the like. Things I knew at the time (or could have known) were not the optimal choice.

"Sorry you have the wrong number" does not mean it's your fault for receiving a phone call.

You learn very early to divorce your ego and sense of self from your artworks and embrace every attempt as an opportunity to improve towards an ideal you can never reach.

You also learn how to give meaningful criticism without being an asshole.

Writing code is very much the same.

Unfortunately, most software engineers haven't been to art school and have no formal training in how to give and receive useful feedback.

I recommend reading Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. It's a good book that helps you build a healthy mindset towards growing as a creative:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaki...

It is about the work, and how other people react to it. The impact is has on other is all that matters. Your intent is interesting, but not relevant to their reaction. So if your work does not get the reaction you hoped for, that not a personal statement about you, it is simply something for you to work on.

I'd imagine no training in normal education is the problem here, not not being to art school...

That is to say, an instructor disseminates organized knowledge to the student. The student may be asked to communicate that knowledge back to prove mastery, but there's not as much emphasis on students giving each other critical feedback. Even when there is, it usually has a minor impact on your academic progress or grades.

As such, there's no incentive to learn how to give good feedback or make use of peer feedback.

Art school tends to be unique in that it cannot be taught that way. You spend years giving and receiving daily critiques and incorporating them into your growth.

The commonly accepted peer review processes we use in today's software engineering field involve giving and receiving feedback on your peers' work at a frequency that the vast majority of people simply have never experienced before.

Few people are naturally good at it, and few companies invest time into training anyone on how to do it well.

It still catches me off guard when I feel someone clenching up while we talk about ways to improve something.

I sometimes take those people through a tour of my own changes and talk through all the ways those could also be improved.

Day one of my first studio class, we did sketches of the person next to us and the instructor helped critique us. We learned to critique each other over time and with careful guidance.

I try to be mindful that the relationship between my work and my person / identity is one of many such relationships in life, and maybe even not the most important one. I think that mindset makes it easier to accept criticism or even to reject it when I think it is irrelevant, misguided, or malicious, as unfortunately workplace criticism can sometimes be.

If your work is being fairly criticized, it's an opportunity to learn and grow. Take it as a compliment that someone actually cared enough about your professional development to offer advice on how to be better. It means they already think that you're good and worthy of improvement. On the other hand, be willing to accept the possibility that that criticism is not actually constructive but intended specifically to make you feel guilty or ashamed. Unfortunately, some people are just petty, small-minded, and manipulative, and will do anything to make you feel small in order for them to feel big.

Yes, this realization has also been important to me. Our personalities have relationships with so many aspects of our lives.

For example: spirituality, emotional intelligence, creative expressions, physical strength, physical appearance, wisdom, appreciation of beauty and aesthetics, and insightfulness. We find identity in our social interactions and friendships, family bonds, adventurous endeavors, empathy, altruism, and our sense of integrity. Leadership abilities, an open-minded growth mindset, resilience, perseverance, and tenacity also play significant roles. Sensitivity, conscientiousness, and our predispositions towards introversion or extraversion shape our interactions with the world, and our ambition, passion, zeal, and humor color our life experiences. Whether we lean towards optimism or pessimism, our self-confidence, our work, vitality, and self-care habits are intrinsic parts of us. We are defined, too, by our commitment to diverse causes, our independence, reliability, online presence, sources of entertainment, groundedness, approachability, friendliness, and our management of financial matters. Personal growth, achievements, hobbies, political affiliations, activism, adaptability, assertiveness, and self-expression add further layers to our identities. Curiosity, disciplinary commitment, frugality or extravagance, generosity or self-centeredness, humility or ostentation, innovative or traditional mindset, mindfulness or airheadedness, pragmatism, respectfulness, philosophical inclinations (like Stoicism or Hedonism), tact or goofiness, virtuosity or departure from traditional virtues, progressivism, visionary thinking or living in the present moment, nurturing of others, commitment to others, and many other facets of life all come together to make a person who they are.

So, where does work fit into all of this? It's but one facet of our lives, almost inconsequential in the grand tapestry.

In societies influenced by American culture (as well as others like the UK, India, and Japan), there's often an undue emphasis on one's professional identity. The question, "What do you do?" has almost become a conventional conversation opener. This, however, is a vestige of outdated social hierarchies rooted in class and caste systems. The modern, holistic sense of self that is prevalent across much of the world has also been gradually permeating American culture. But, this cultural baggage can make us fixate too much on our professions.

But we are not forced to stick around in tradition and the past, unless we want to. I certainly do not. And that helps with seeing work for what it is in our lives - just one small aspect.

EDIT: Rephrased the long list into a paragraph so that it does not take up half of the comments on the page vertically :)

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.

This is complete shit, start over.

Even though there's vulgarity, it's explicitly directed at "this" and not "you." If the vulgarity is indicative of any frustration, then it means my work was below their expectations - which necessarily implies that they have come to expect more from my work. This is confirmed by their direction to start over, without any additional oversight or specific micromanagement. The boss who says this respects you, respects your work, and knows you can do better than this uncharacteristic example without them holding your hand.

If you used this pattern in this area, it would become easier to read

"You." This comment is directed at me and the choices I made. The comment uses the conditional - it isn't frustrated, it's wistful. The language is stilted and formal; they're keeping me at an arm's length. And easier to read? Humiliating that my thought process is that incoherent.

This variable has a generic name, please make it more expressive.

Very simple present tense statement, followed by very simple imperative. I'm clearly being handled. And please? They are literally begging me not to suck so bad. This isn't just arms-length language, this is you're-going-on-a-PIP-and-we're-being-careful-not-to-give-you-any-employment-law-leverage language. If someone ever gives me feedback like this, that's a sign I'm going to get fired.

If it's genuine, why not respond with "good call, will update" or "I couldn't think of anything better for this situation - do you have any suggestions?"

This variable has a generic name, please make it more expressive

is an indication you're heading to a PIP and a firing seems to be reading a huge amount of negativity into a comment that isn't warranted.

Different cultures and work environments perhaps, but I've often written and received similarly terse statements on code reviews; it's just business as usual. As a rule, I have a huge amount of respect and value my team members - as I hope and believe they do for me. I do often (but not always) use the conditional rather than imperative tense as part of my British cultural baggage; but I doubt most people even consider that.

Edit: on further reflection, I think the better relationship I have with the engineer in the code review, the comments get more terse. You can write extremely brief things like "should be private" or "missing type annotation" because you know the baseline working relationship has enough trust and mutual respect to support comments like that without offence.

Baseline working relationship has trust and respect: "should be private"

Otherwise: "This is supposed to be encapsulated. Please make this variable private."

Stilted, formal, directive language is not a hallmark of a healthy working relationship, and the number of replies to my comment here that seem to take the opposite position... is not encouraging.

Additionally, that’s not even scratching the surface for HR documentation that is required for underperformance. It needs to be blatant “you are not meeting expectations” phrasing.

"This is complete shit because of X Y Z" is actionable "this is complete shit" is not. At what or who it is directed is irrelevant, it's useless.

> The boss who says this respects you, respects your work, and knows you can do better than this uncharacteristic example without them holding your hand.

Nope, because again, no indication why it his shit.

>> If you used this pattern in this area, it would become easier to read

> "You." This comment is directed at me and the choices I made. The comment uses the conditional - it isn't frustrated, it's wistful. The language is stilted and formal; they're keeping me at an arm's length.

Yes, "you" prima-ballerina, you wrote it, take responsibility for it.

> And easier to read? Humiliating that my thought process is that incoherent.

You should be. Code is for reading. You should know that by now.

It would be different if it was directed at junior dev but you should know better.

Fix it and move on, everyone writes bad or unclear code sometimes.

>> This variable has a generic name, please make it more expressive.

> Very simple present tense statement, followed by very simple imperative. I'm clearly being handled. And please? They are literally begging me not to suck so bad. This isn't just arms-length language, this is you're-going-on-a-PIP-and-we're-being-careful-not-to-give-you-any-employment-law-leverage language. If someone ever gives me feedback like this, that's a sign I'm going to get fired.

That's insanely weird assumptions you're making. Everyone makes bad code. Being polite is hedging your bet against how the other side answers to your feedback. If you know someone and you know their style "hey dude, this reads like shit, fix it" can be entirely enough and just fine, but if you don't know the person all that well being nice won't hurt.

Not "you named variable weird, you're fired" like you're trying to interpret it

The one thing that solved this for me, and I mean utterly cured it, was _talking to my coworkers about it_. This of course only works if you feel comfortable being vulnerable to your coworkers. I was lucky enough to work with people who I am also friends with. I literally said to them over a first pint after work: "when I get critical PR comments it makes me feel bad and defensive. Sorry if I sometimes come across guarded that way".

This opened an amazingly productive conversation that changed my relationship with my colleagues forever, as they opened up about their struggles in this area (you would be surprised at how common this is, it is human nature after all) and we shared advice and jokes.

Sometimes I think we (as a software community and species) try to tackle these things alone to avoid displaying our vulnerable sides, but I think this is a tragic facet of modern culture.

Humility I may be wrong, Empathy that if I get it wrong the customer will suffer (in varying magnitudes, of course)

Some of my first programs were in C. 100s of Hours and millions of switch to terminal, gcc, error message beat it into me -- "The computer isnt wrong, I am" . Now I am ok with hearing "This code has properties you didn't anticipate" because that's been true millions of times. And it's produced the humility, that I can't get it right on first try, and it's rare I get it right even by 3rd or 5th try.

Instead we implement, seek feedback (from compliler, tests, peers, more tests, datadog), iterate.

And I like to remind myself also of empathy. Do my feelings matter if it's going to affect the customer? If I get reactive and refuse to solve someones feedback, the customer will suffer. If I get reactive too often, it will silence the feedback (but not improve my coding). The customer suffers, so for that reason My feelings do not get a vote.

Edit: I'd also like to note the religious link that people have lost a spiritual connection of their self-worth[1], and in it's place have adopted a professional and materialism meaning when their professional work is criticized, so is the root of their identity.

Edit: Ok "millions" was hyperbole. A better estimate is something like half a million compilations/builds in my ~20 yrs writing code in a non-hobbyist context.

[1]: (at least in my religion it affirms your inherent value as God created and declared "Good" in design and nature, lets not turn this into a religious debate)

The next step is to tame your emotional response. It's almost never a good idea to act based on emotions so you first need to get a level head before responding. You can journal, meditate, go in a room and rage out if you need to, but just get that chimpanzee in your brain to settle down. Not easy but has to be done if you want to transcend whatever is coming your way. Sometimes you will fail but there's always next time so just keep at it.

Once you've settled down, now it's time to rationally consider the content of the critique and decide how to respond. Criticism can come in many different shapes and sizes: valid, invalid, clear, vague, harsh and nice, well timed, ill timed. Unfortunately, some people can be downright mean so handling harsh and uncivil criticism is a skill that takes time to master. If you notice most highly successful people, they take nasty criticism like water off a duck's back. That being said, it's really unacceptable to have people making snarky comments on your work and if it's a pattern there, I'd consider finding a more nurturing place to work.

Once all that's done, decide whether the argument is valid and if so make the adjustment in good faith. If not respond, with your reasons respectfully and with an open mind. They may respond in turn, and if so you and your colleagues will have achieved a harmonious spirt of working together towards a higher truth and you will benefit in ways that cannot be overstated.

Oh you have a bug in the patch? No, there's a bug in the patch. Oh you missed an edge case? No, there's an edge case nobody had documented yet.

The point was mostly about how to give feedback on the patch, and to never phrase it about the person personally, but perhaps it would help to try and catch yourself thinking of the feedback this way and have your internal dialog look at the patch as being separate from you.

Yes, it's your work, but it's always a work in progress, and it's everybody's work to try and make incremental improvements to the code, to the process, etc.

I used to think I didn't like working with inexperienced engineers, but I noticed that what I actually didn't like was people who were unwilling to candidly discuss ways to improve, whether they were junior or senior - it's just a little easier to spot in people more junior than one's self. So kudos to you for recognizing this, because if you can learn to absorb constructive feedback it's a real game changer for you and for everyone around you too.

Not that that is worthless, mind; but becoming aware of that in the process is what makes you senior. By definition of it being part of growth. With time, you will have been no both ends of more and more reviews. Hopefully you start to see how both sides of the conversation that is a pull request go.

And note that you can't "policy away" bad snarky comments. If someone is giving a ton of those, or is generally tone deaf, work with them. If it is someone you don't want to work with, pull in peers to help work through that. If you don't have a support network, start there above anything. Even if things seem to be going well, having peers to lean on is important for the times that it doesn't. Learning to be a good peer is equally vital, and is a part of what makes the reviews more relatable and part of a group project.

For example, if there seem to be two interpretations of a comment on a PR, one that is genuine and one that is snarky, assume they were genuinely trying to help and reject the snarky version. This is easier said than done, but it's a useful skill to practice.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity