New Workplace, Old Faults

Hello all,

So it's been about a month since I started my new job, and I've learned/reaffirmed a few things:

1. No matter what your job is, bring a pocket knife, it's useful. 
2. Something will always go wrong with a project, always.
3. I am absolutely terrible at taking criticism sometimes.

It's the last one I wanted to address in the post.

So I have known this for a while, but I've always been somewhat shielded from it at work, as I've always worked as the sole software tester, or the most senior one, so it was easy enough for me to assume I was always right (or at least, right on the things I felt sure of).

So why did I go to a larger company where I knew this would happen? A few reasons:

• I wanted to learn how to work with a team of actual software testers, where I wasn't the only one with experience.
• More specifically, I wanted to learn how to deal with criticism, whether it was correct or incorrect, polite or impolite.
• I wanted to learn how to give criticism in such a way that it helped someone, not just frustrated them, and the best way to learn that (I think), is to get some criticism yourself.

So after a month...well, I'm still frustrated most of the time when my work is criticized, and I still mentally make excuses for why someone else picks apart my work.

On the plus side, I've actually listened to the critiques I've gotten. I've incorporated them into my work, and, I've asked questions as to why certain things were brought up.

So while I might not ever enjoy being critiqued, I at least feel like I can get something useful out of them, something I hope to not lose sight of the next time a code review or similar comes back.

So, I suppose as a challenge for anyone posting...how do you deal with or give out critiques?

Take care all