[seaknoll]

I'm not perfect about this but one experience in particular helped me.

I was a new employee doing on-the-job training for an even newer employee, while we were trying to meet a deadline. We were the only two people working on this project, in the middle of rural NM, out of cell range, and having to improvise. He kept making suggestions and I kept explaining why they wouldn't work. Suddenly he point-blank asked me why I said no to everything. I had a moment of clarity where I realized that I didn't even want him to be right, for no good reason except my ego. I apologized, horrified, and have been forever grateful for the wake-up.

After that I started to notice that pattern elsewhere. The best way I've found to interrupt it is to ask myself "what if they're right" and/or "in what way might this person be right that I may not have considered"?

[kilburn]

> The best way I've found to interrupt it is to ask myself "what if they're right" and/or "in what way might this person be right that I may not have considered"?

There's also a great question to ask yourself even before those: is it worth it?

A lot of times just ignoring improvements you can see/sense is the right call. Every time you bring up a suggestion (whether it is to a teammate or to yourself) your are affecting the environment in ways that can compound. For instance:

- You may break the creation flow, interrupting the far more important "advancing to the greater goal" by perfecting a middle-step that matters much less and can be easily corrected afterwards if need be.

- You are de-valuing your future suggestions/feelings, because the more stuff you bring up, the less weigh they get in the long run.

- You risk lowering your teammate's confidence / degrading your relationship (just like you were doing in your story).

If you are one of these people who just cannot "let something go", what you can do is write that thing down. Just make a note "revisit X thingy" and come back to it later when the rest is done/clear. This should allow you to actually move forward towards the "big picture" with a clearer mind (i.e.: without having that thread stuck wasting effort on what you just "ignored").

Finally, if the issue is important enough that it requires solving to advance, another great attitude is to ask yourself "how can we make this work?" instead of stopping at "this doesn't work because X".

Propose things even if you can see they don't completely solve the issue. This fosters a collaborative building attitude where you can fill in your teammate's blanks and vice-versa. Simply stating what doesn't work shuts down idea sharing and limits the team's creativity to that of the individuals, instead of the (oftentimes much greater) sum of the team.

[donatj]

> If you are one of these people who just cannot "let something go", what you can do is write that thing down.

I used to be hypercritical in code review, but I started instead just taking note of small things that didn’t really matter and fixing them myself during downtime.

I feel a little mixed on the solution. On the one hand it has the junior devs less afraid of me and more willing to actually ask for help. On the other hand they’re not learning from some of their mistakes. Life is full of trade offs though.

[xkgt]

I have the opposite problem. I always struggle with frequent interrupts wondering "what if I am wrong?" and I fail to move forward without utmost conviction.

Nowadays I try to tell myself that no one is perfect, especially me. Expecting oneself to be correct all time is actually egoistic even though the end result turns out to be being humble and having self-doubts. To fail or to be wrong is natural. My boss even encourages me to fail sometimes, to be comfortable with the possibility failure. I am not saying that I am doing these things by default now, but at least I make it a point to try.

[seaknoll]

I'd also suggest trying to harness the "what if I am wrong" so you can use it to your advantage - it sounds like the kind of attitude that could make you excellent at testing. If you turn it into a curious question instead of a self-judgment, it may help identify ways to test something that would give you full confidence that it works. Which is a very valuable skill to have.

[PaulStatezny]

In the last few years my brain has been somewhat "re-wired" so that I'm able to detect and escape "negativity ruts" more easily.

And it's the same story – some colleagues that have been willing to speak honestly about how my attitude can affect them/the team.

Team diversity (and teammates bold enough to speak up) are great!

[russelldjimmy]

This is such an important realisation. You basically awoke from a state of sleep, a state of dreaming, and straight into reality. This is great.

[baby]

I have a similar experience. A gf first told me that I was too negative, and then a friend when working on a side project. Both event made me think a lot about it. I’m still working on it but this really makes me think that feedback, as much as I hate receiving it, does improve people.

[fnl]

Every time I catch myself thinking "wrong" about a position or solution someone states, I remind myself that my thinking is probably the only wrong thing here. I displace that negative behavior with curiosity.

That means, trying to explore what the other person might know that I do not. What data or knowledge I am missing could have lead that person to the view or position my fast thinking labeled as wrong?

Rarely, it does happen that I had more context or data, but those are outliers. In general, by adapting my behavior from thinking "wrong!" to thinking "what does this person know that I do not?" I am able to have way more productive conversations.

[raxxorrax]

I don't think negative comments are obnoxious. I vastly prefer them to being a naive fan of everything. I believe this negativity is just being realistic and isn't a result of an inflated ego or insecurity. Reality is that people are often handed a bad deal and it is endemic in the tech industry by now.

There is a difference to saying no to everything of course, but part of the negativity in tech is that it is earned.

[anakaine]

Thank you for that post. Thats personally something I probably needed to hear and make a consideration to address what is, frankly, a negativity problem.