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.