Comment by carlmr
6 years ago
Thank you, I appreciate your take on this. I personally also like to learn from criticism, but it took me a long time to be able to accept it better. I try to get to know the other developers first to get a feeling for whether or not they're used to accepting criticism. If the other person becomes defensive I try to be more careful, if they seem more accepting I will continue being critical.
Usually I would be more openly critical if someone is more experienced.
Learning to accept criticism isnt easy. I've found one way, at least for me, is to be self-critical. I'm usually harder on myself than my peers. Makes it a bit easier to accept when someone else points out a flaw.
I think it’s something you can develop as a team. One of the best teams I’ve ever worked on took blameless post-mortems very seriously. If a decision you made lead to an incident, then you had to attend a PM, explain what you did, and why you did it. Most people got pretty stressed about their first PM, but would pretty soon come to realise that they were actually quite positive experiences. The team knew that failure was something that was completely unavoidable. You can continuously improve the resilience of your systems, but you will still have failures every so often. As such it’s not ‘your fault’ when you cause a failure, it’s just something that happens, and the only thing we can do about it is learn from it. People would figure out pretty quickly that everybody on the team wanted everybody else on the team to succeed, and that that’s what motivated all critical discussion. This team had succeeded in building a trust that everybody had everybody else’s best interests in mind, and because of that criticism was given openly and without creating conflict or feelings of judgement.
That said, I’ve also learned a lot from giving misguided criticism on PRs. I’d point out something I thought was wrong and the author would come back to me and point out some misunderstanding I had. This sort of work environment is one that naturally maximises personal development, and eliminates a lot of the anxiety people have about making mistakes at work. It takes a lot of continuous effort, but imo developing that sort of culture is far more valuable in the long run than developing social conventions around sugar coating criticism.