---
layout: post
title:  Giving Feedback
date:   2018-09-17
tags: [engineering empathy, work culture]
---
Been at my current company for a bit over a year now and thought I'd
share some thoughts about providing feedback and the lack of formal
feedback. Specifically I'd like to address feedback from a personal
improvement/relationships perspective, not feedback in terms of customer
or engineering feedback.

At all of my previous jobs 1-on-1 meetings were held either on a
quarterly or annual basis for formal discussions on personal
development. They were great opportunities in encouraging self
reflection on things I excel at as well as areas I need to improve at.
As important as technical proficiency ratings were, subjective soft skills were
just as relevant. These scheduled and formal sessions documented
measurable personal progression and built trust/confidence between
myself and my supervisor.

Currently there are no formal ways of soliciting and providing personal
feedback at my company. There have been three company-wide standups since I onboarded
over a year ago. The first occurred after a client chewed out one of our
teams out for essentially delivering a faulty product. The overall
tone of that standup was of the wake-up call variety stressing
tests. The second was a pizza party held to boost morale in preparation
for some grueling days ahead. The most recent standup was a call to
action for all of our engineers to improve. It was exposed that a
recently resigned coworker was let go because of poor code quality, and
was looking for a new job. Upon receiving a reference call for an
interview with a different company, our PM revealed the subpar code
quality situation. The standup ended with a stern warning that our code
reflects not only ourselves but the reputation of the company.

I'm certainly at odds with the nature of these standups. I started my
career in places that emphasized personal development as a means to
growing the company and raising standards. I doubled down on these
values when I went through Devbootcamp. We were drilled to provide
each other with actionable, specific, and kind feedback. The feedback
was instrumental in improving our skill and building postive
relationships.

Writing more tests is certainly actionable, but not specific enough.
Neither is improving code quality. There certainly was nothing kind
about roasting an absent former coworker.

I can definitely do better in how I frame my feedback to teammates.
There are times I do get frustrated and reply with something along the
lines of "Go read the documentation." or "Why would you break
ActiveRecord by overriding the save method?"

The absence of feedback is stagnation or worse, continued decline
through the passive reinforcement of bad patterns. Only you can
prevent forest fires.

Add post about giving good feedback
Add post about giving good feedback
