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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
exist to exist the whole way through. do what you gotta do.
many SV people have probably also seen anecdotal evidence the $B crowd has this mindset. it's the $M crowd sweatin the small stuff.
> 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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Easier to say than to embrace, of course.)
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
