Feedback is not a battle to be won

Have you ever left a feedback session feeling like it escalated into a battle? The feedback that you wanted to give led to a constant back and forth, a bit like debating who is at fault, and afterward, the actual critique was still valid but somehow didn’t get the attention it needed?

Giving feedback is rarely easy. As you grow in your career, you will increasingly find yourself giving feedback to others. Unfortunately, this is not a skill typically taught in schools (at least, I’m not aware of it). We often come from backgrounds where people mostly receive feedback but rarely have to give it. Furthermore, the feedback they do receive is often poorly delivered or impersonal. Standard phrases or overly general feedback are quite common. This becomes apparent when you are suddenly asked to give feedback to someone else. Even if the recipient is performing well, quality feedback can still be a deciding factor in their overall growth. It gets even trickier when someone doesn’t meet expectations and you have to deliver negative feedback.

Why the Best Conversations Aren’t Effortless

As a software engineer you almost never work on topics that you are an expert in. Sure you understand how to design a system, how to fix a bug or how to improve the performance of it. But often your business has quite special needs, be it in advertisement, logistics or legal topics. We work together with many experts who usually built a great intuition to fill the gap. If this works well you learn to rely on them and in the best case you develop a really great working mode. You might not really learn to appreciate this unless you experienced what happens when this does not work well.

Learning the Hard Way

One memory that will probably stay with me forever is from a Sunday back in May 2018.

After years of self-taught piano playing, I finally convinced myself to find a teacher again. I had played piano for almost 20 years by then. I knew some details were off. But overall, I was happy with how I played. I tackled difficult pieces, had good finger control, could jump around the keyboard with precision. I had energy, and I had fun.