How to handle negative feedback
It’s almost never about you 🤷🏻♂️
Most engineers I know don’t post on LinkedIn, or choose to not use LinkedIn at all, for one single reason.
It isn’t because they lack ideas, and it isn’t because they can’t write.
It is because of a specific kind of social anxiety: the fear of judgment.
It acts like a sort of social phobia, a self-fulfilling prophecy: you are terrified that if you expose yourself, someone will attack you or ridicule you.
So you stay silent.
You treat the comment section like a minefield where one wrong step could destroy your reputation.
I know this feeling very well because I have experienced it many times.
The trap of taking it personally
For example, once I published an article I was particularly proud of. I hit “Post” and went on with my day.
A few hours later, I saw a notification.
It wasn’t a constructive discussion. It was a comment that mocked the content, dismissing the whole post with a sarcastic joke.
My immediate reaction was visceral.
First, I felt shock. Then, I felt offended. And finally, I felt anger.
I felt the urge to reply. I wanted to defend my work, to explain why they were wrong, to prove my point.
My brain started spinning, trying to find a reason for that attack:
“Is he jealous? Maybe he wants to do what I’m doing?”
“Is he trying to devalue my work to make himself feel better?”
“Did I actually write something stupid?”
I had the cursor on the “Reply” button.
But then, I stopped. I realized that replying would only feed a loop of negativity.
By reacting, I would have made my online presence “unpleasant”, effectively betraying myself. I would have become exactly what I fear: a source of negativity.
So I let it go. I didn’t reply. I just moved on.
But to do that, I had to understand why it hurt so much.
Why ambiguity scares us (and how to fix it)
As Software Engineers, we are trained to hate ambiguity.
In code, undefined is an error. A requirement must be clear. A boolean is true or false.
When things are ambiguous, we panic. We try to fill the void with our own logic.
But human interactions are full of ambiguity.
When someone leaves a bad comment—or worse, when they ignore you—there is no stack trace explaining why.
There is no error log telling you specifically what went wrong.
I personally struggle with this. When there is no clear definition, I go into chaos.
My brain tries to interpret the situation, and often, it chooses the most dramatic, pessimistic interpretation of reality: “They hate me. I am an impostor”.
This is where I force myself to apply Occam’s Razor.
Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
My Complex Interpretation: “This person has analyzed my post, found a deep flaw in my character, and decided to publicly humiliate me”. -> (Very Unlikely)
The Simple Interpretation: “This person was having a bad day, saw something that annoyed them for 2 seconds, wrote an impulsive comment, and forgot about me 10 seconds later”. -> (Very Likely)
Or perhaps, they are fighting a personal battle I know nothing about, and they were blinded by their own context. It was a huge misunderstanding, not a targeted attack.
This tendency to “prepare for the worst case” makes me a good developer, but it creates huge problems in relationships. I often realize that I am fighting a battle that exists only in my head.
The battles we don’t see
Once you accept the simple explanation, you change your perspective. You realize that negativity is rarely a targeted assassination of your character.
Often, we are just collateral damage. Maybe my post appeared on their feed while they were stressed about a deadline. Maybe the topic touched a nerve related to their own insecurities. Maybe they were just fighting a personal battle I know nothing about, and they needed to vent.
They didn’t attack me. They attacked a projection of me that triggered something in them. When you understand that people react based on their own internal context—not your absolute value—the anger fades. You don’t feel the need to win the argument anymore. You realize that their comment says much more about their state of mind than it does about your work.
When the silence becomes noisy
There is something even scarier than a negative comment: Zero Feedback.
You spend hours writing. You post.
1 hour passes. Silence.
4 hours pass. Still silence.
I have been there. Recently.
I posted something I thought was brilliant. Result: 0 interactions.
And that silence became incredibly noisy.
Because there was no feedback, my brain started filling the silence with loud insecurities:
“Did I write a shitty thing?”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Is everyone ignoring me on purpose?”
It’s easy to spiral. It’s easy to think you should delete the post and hide.
But falling into this trap is human. Feeling bad is allowed.
What matters is pulling yourself out of it using logic.
A post with 0 likes is not a rejection of your person. It is just an error in the process.
Maybe the hook was weak. Maybe the algorithm blinked. The reality is often much less dramatic than we think.
You just have to accept that.
Mistakes happen, or something external doesn’t make it work this time.
Don’t feel ashamed for a single failure.
The hidden asset: Free Data
Now that we have stripped away the fear and the ego, we can look at the feedback for what it really is: Data.
In the startup world, companies pay thousands of dollars for “user testing” to find out what is wrong with their product. When someone leaves a negative comment, they are giving you that consulting for free.
Even if they are rude, and even if they misunderstood your point, there is value in their reaction.
If they misunderstood, maybe your writing wasn’t clear enough.
If they called it clickbait, maybe your hook was too aggressive.
If they found a logical hole, maybe your argument needs tightening.
There is a saying that goes:
“Positive feedback builds confidence. Negative feedback builds competence”.
Positive feedback feels good, but it rarely teaches you anything new. It just confirms what you already know. Negative feedback, however, exposes your blind spots. It is the only thing that actually makes you grow.
Conclusion
If you are waiting for the day you can post without fear of judgment, you will wait forever. The only way to overcome this fear is to accept that misunderstandings and mistakes will happen.
You will make mistakes.
Someone will misinterpret your words.
Someone will mock you.
Let them. In fact, you should welcome it. That friction is not a sign of failure; it is the sign that you are active, you are learning, and you are building competence.
Eleanor Roosevelt famously said:
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do”.
The reality becomes suddenly less scary when you stop giving all that power to the things that frighten you. The moment you realize that their reaction—or lack of it—is not about you, but about them (and sometimes, useful to you), you become free.