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- Don't soften feedback
Don't soften feedback
#64 – November 22, 2021
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Sometimes, folks who have to deliver hard-to-hear feedback soften it to the point where their teammate doesn’t clearly understand what they should do next. This feedback-giver is trying to be nice: they’re aiming to avoid hurting the person’s feelings, catching them by surprise, hijacking their amygdala, or demoralizing them.
Code quality affects the mental state of a programmer, communication within their team, and the incentives attached to their work. Improve your code and you can improve your organizational health and competence as a whole.
It is natural to need things from other teams. It can be tempting to wait for them or depend on them to provide something for you. This happens because they own the area you need to do work in.
Employing a directive model doesn’t mean being a jerk or overly controlling. As you’ll see, sometimes, being directive is the most empowering thing you can do for your team.
It is very difficult to explain the nature of software engineering work to stakeholders who don’t work in engineering. We compensate salespeople, for example, partly with commissions that reflect their individual performance. That’s because someone in sales is able to individually improve some small metric for the company. And anyone working in operations or customer support can be judged at least in part by the number of issues they’ve handled and how satisfied the company is with the outcomes of those issues.