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0 pointslazide3y ago0 comments

Is your intrinsic value as a person due to what someone else thinks of the quality of your work? If so, that is inherently dangerous and fragile. That is what is being warned against.

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?

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kazinator3y ago· 1 in thread

> Is your intrinsic value as a person due to what someone else thinks of the quality of your work?

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."

lazideOP3y ago

The challenge I think is rational analysis != emotional reality many (often most) times. And many times emotional reality is due to some physical element we’re just not noticing (didn’t eat lunch, or haven’t stretched in years, or whatever).

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.

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