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Comment by mooism2 | Hacker News Reader

There is a difference between criticising something so that it (and other things like it) can be improved, and criticising something as a means of tearing something (or someone) down.

Good criticism means saying what is good about something as well as what is bad.

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I find that a lot of people can't tell the difference between what's meant to be constructive criticism and an insult.

I agree. Indeed, if you criticize the choices a professional made in his area of expertise, you are often criticizing their competence and/or intelligence by implication.

Often, the right target for criticism is supposed to be the person himself. For example, if someone without the right domain knowledge or understanding of math deluded himself into thinking he knows enough and starts messing things up, you really don't want to help him along.

Imagine some VB noob "fixing" your mission-critical Lisp code, saying it would have been easier if it was all ported to .NET or something.

Dealing with all these situations in the best way possible requires a lot of finesse, I'm sure.

I just noticed, in retrospect, that such a blunt approach as not giving any criticism ever is STILL better (for me, not my employer necessarily) than what I was doing.

I run into this problem all the time. As hard as I try to be diplomatic whoever I am trying to give constructive criticism is insulted. It doesn't help that I'm usually trying to give criticism to my boss, but still (at the jobs I've held I have had very few colleagues other than my direct boss).

COMPLETELY wrong. Telling someone the good as well as the bad is an obvious sandwich - everyone knows this, and the good is completely ignored.

Saying something is good is praise. Saying the bad is critism. Combining them makes some type of praise-criticism hybrid, it does not make good criticism. Let me give you an example of what you are saying:

Hey Dude, I really love the colors on your website. It sucks that your website is really useless to the entire world, but that butterfly you put up there is lovely.

How is that good criticism?

Some things and people should be torn down.

Yes, although they are a minority.

My home country was under single party rule in the 90's and has now emerged as a vibrant democracy with economic power on par with Australia thanks to such tearing down.

Polite requests were not sufficient to bring about change. It took confrontational, attacking arguments as well.

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