A sign that I found missing from the list: you are totally devoted to a particular programming language and believe it's a silver bullet. All good programmers that I know understand that languages are just tools and all have tradeoffs of some sort.
I think it's really important to feel proud of what you do. For me, I always like to feel I'm the center of the world, while knowing that it's not true.
When people ask me what I'm proud of I always list the stuff that gave me most satisfaction. I often start with the stuff that they would understand or heard of, but if you'd ask me again I'd probably list some obscure stuff.
For example, I am really proud that I started the online version of the Romanian Computer Science olympiad for high school students. I convinced people to let me build a parallel online system where we'd post the problems at the same time with the real contest, and people would submit solutions by the end of the allocated time, and then we'd grade those too. Totally unofficial, just for kicks and training.
It's a stupid thing that nobody ever heard of here, but I'm still terribly proud of it, it made a huge difference in the life of some kids and it would not have happened if it wasn't for me, so I'm quite proud of that.
I think there are benefits and drawbacks to both being supportive even if you don't think that the idea is good, and to being brutally honest.
After living here long enough I'm no longer trying to judge, it's just the way things are, and I just learned to translate. That's why I made the graphs.
I think it's only irrelevant if you understand this difference of translation and adapt to it.
Not everybody understands it though, specially when you first move here or when you first have contact with the US. I know it took me a non trivial amount of time to realize it.
I think your piece is interesting, informative, useful, and well written. I just don't think others' opinion on ideas are particularly relevant. My opinion on Dropbox/Heroku/AirBnb's ideas would have all fallen on the left side of the bell curve, which only shows my opinion on ideas is irrelevant. I am just saying that the position one is placed on the bell curve is not important. Understanding different cultures is very important.
I won't address the relative merits of different cultural norms on being supportive vs being brutally honest.
I just don't think others' opinion on ideas
are particularly relevant. My opinion on
Dropbox/Heroku/AirBnb's ideas would have all
fallen on the left side of the bell curve,
which only shows my opinion on ideas is
irrelevant.
I think what you are trying to say is "take advice/opinions with a grain of salt".
I've recieved plenty of bad (and good) feedback on products that ended up being successful, but if someone who is considered a world-renown expert in my field tells me I have problems A, B & C I'm going to listen carefully.
A good intuition of what will and will not be on a critical path is also helpful. I will never spend time optimizing a method I know is called rarely, but if I know something is on the critical path then I'll keep an eye on performance and build it in such a way that I can visualise a way to refactor it "the right way" further down the road.
In my past life I've worked on the Google Maps identity story when Google Hotpot launched (allowing you to set a maps nickname, while still having friends on Google Maps). I feel that identity on the web is a harder problem than most people realize.
My personal opinion is that you have to strike the right balance between
+ establishing trust in the production of content (you want other people to trust what you post, build an identity). Producing anonymous/pseudonymous content is fine, but how can I, as a consumer of that content (reader of reviews) can make sure I can trust it?
+ offerring users the protection they want from entities bothered by the content you produce. This can range from the extreme cases of freedom of speech, minorities, sensitive issues (medical, sexual orientation) to the more trivial examples of bad reviews for restaurants where the owners might track you down.
+ incentivizing the production of high quality content and discussions (see the quality of YouTube comments for a case of user generated content gone wrong :-) ).
+ making it easy for users to deal with this identity complexity. Understanding that even though you are logged in with your GMail account you are posting as a Nickname, understanding what others can or cannot infer about you.
It's a complicated problem full of tradeoffs any way you want to go.
+ Go with real-name all the time and you upset the people that are not comfortable exposing their real name.
+ Go with pseudonymity and you lose the benefits brought by having an identity on the web.
+ Go with a compromise and you have to deal with complicated user experience problems.
