[nickknw]

> Personally, I feel the whole "positive attitude" thing is a detriment. People with "positive attitudes" tend to ignore problems because they don't want to upset others or make waves.

I think I know the kind of people you're talking about, but please don't think all "positive" people are in that same category. I think constructive criticism is great, and in no way do I want to stop giving it or receiving it.

But there's a lot of criticism that goes out of its way to be mean or condescending. And there's a lot of criticism with only one purpose: to make the criticizer look smart. These are not useful and they drown out the constructive feedback.

Sometimes being negative is appropriate! I'm not happy all the time. But it SHOULDN'T be a habit - negativity like that is not helpful to the person doing it and it's not helpful to those around them.

[russelluresti]

Criticism and complaint are one thing, but I think it boils down to what certain people are able to see. For example, if we're working on a project and I tell you "Hey, I don't think this solution is going to work. There are too many points of failure and something's going to go wrong. We need a plan for when these things go wrong." As a negative person, I focus on all the way things can go wrong. I've envisioned what would happen with each one. But as a positive person, you don't see them. Or, if you do see them, you think they're so unlikely that you don't consider them serious.

Now, if we planned for things to go wrong (as a negative person would) and things go right, all we lose is a little bit of time that was spent creating backup plans. But if we planned for things to go right, and things do go wrong, we're in a situation where we have to scramble.

That's why I think positive attitudes can be detrimental. If you err, I feel you should err on the side of caution, and that typically requires a negative outlook (because positive people won't waste their time on it).

[nickknw]

> As a negative person, I focus on all the way things can go wrong. I've envisioned what would happen with each one. But as a positive person, you don't see them. Or, if you do see them, you think they're so unlikely that you don't consider them serious.

That's interesting, we seem to have wildly different definitions for these words. I view it like this:

As a programmer, I plan for things to go wrong. As a positive person, I try to express it in a constructive way. Caution and forward thinking is not necessarily tied to being negative!!

Planning for when things go wrong isn't just something a negative person would do, it's also something a cautious or sensible person would do. Or an experienced software developer! If I've learned anything from programming it's that no matter how unlikely an error condition seems, it WILL happen sooner or later.

I HAVE seen the kind of person you are talking about though - there are the people who think that just being positive will make bad things less likely to happen, and then people who are just overly optimistic about everything. Not every person who identifies as positive thinks this way though! :)

[RougeFemme]

It's like employing defensive programming in your everyday. You plan for the unlikely negative event so that you can contain/minimize the impact. . .but you don't dwell on it forever.