

Ask HN: Best constructive criticism - 3Dpuzzlepiece

What has been the best constructive criticism you&#x27;ve received - professional or personal - and how did you handle it?
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poof131
One of the most memorable was early in primary flight training for the Navy.
It was my last flight before the Christmas Holidays and it went poorly, not F
but C- quality. I really liked the instructor, a cool guy helicopter pilot.
Walking back from the plane, he said it didn’t go well. I agreed and said my
mind just wasn’t in it, thinking about the holidays. He stopped, turned to me
and said, “I don’t want to hear that f _#%ing s%$t. Don’t make f_ #%ing
excuses.” He said a few more mean things that I can’t recall.

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

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

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LarryMade2
Post in a forum criticising of loading/handling (filtered) POSTed form data
into individual strings, the criticism was "The better way is to use an array.
What good reason do you have to to load strings individually?"

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

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

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

