Hey there– it's been a minute. If you're curious about what else I've been up to, you can take a look at my monthly newsletter, Mere Being, as well as the development newsletter for the software project I've been working on, StoryTime.

Otherwise– some corporate software thoughts–

Have you ever gotten actually useful technical feedback? If I ever have I'm not aware of it. The closest things I can remember:

• "When you don't know exactly what code to write, you freeze. Try writing pseudocode instead."
• "You should spend some time outside of work reading Ruby books."
• "You should memorize Java's for loop syntax."
• "You're worse than your teammate at debugging problems based on logs from a system that said teammate used to work on."

The first at least did improve my technical skills but it was actually process feedback.

The other two were... not wrong? But not particularly useful, either. I spent about a year obsessing over that third piece of feedback. It was a relief, later, when a new manager told me I should probably ignore it– Java was a niche language at that company, and focusing on it in particular wasn't particularly useful for me.

Ultimately all the feedback was really "write more code."

I've been thinking a lot about feedback, because I've been taking an improv class, and part of taking an improv class is getting a lot of notes on my performance. I expected to hate this because usually I hate feedback. It stresses me out. I obsess about it.

Instead, feedback in the improv class is fine. Good, even. I'm a little disappointed when I only get told what I did well in a scene, and jealous of the people who get told what to change.

The feedback is stuff like

• "You need to make that emotional choice clearer. The audience can't necessarily read something subtle. Try just literally just saying what you feel."
• "Repeat back what your scene partner says before moving on to what you're going to say next."
• "Try rapidly cycling from one emotion to the next as your partner lists the problems they're having."
• "Pause, and then say how you both feel about each other."
• "I thought this one particular line was really funny."
• "I was really emotionally invested in that scene."
• "I liked how it started really slow with that quiet space work, it really created a contrast when the scene got manic later."

I had a similar experience in college, where I primarily studied writing. Those classes were all feedback: Write a thing, get comments on it from your peers. Again, that's fine. I didn't get anywhere near as wound up about it.

The vast majority of feedback I have ever gotten at work has been about my "communication style." How people perceived me. It was stuff like

• "When you get excited about finding bugs, the rest of the team feels kind of bad, because it draws attention to how many bugs there are on the project."
• "The way you pointed out that 'FTM' has a meaning other than 'full time manager' made the person who worked on this document feel bad."
• "You should be less sarcastic, I used a lot of sarcasm when I first came to this country but I've found that Americans don't really get it."
• "When you were arguing for this technical change you spent a lot of time talking about how you feel about it and I don't understand why I should care about that."

Some of this was useful but overall the effect was that I was distracted from solving technical problems. I think I learned less about being an engineer because of how much effort I spent worrying about how I was coming across. I felt like I was constantly modifying my behavior. When I left that job it was kind of relief to just be allowed to... be... without being constantly monitored for deviations and potential improvements.

I don't have a good, neat takeaway here. Maybe someday I will have worked out why the craft feedback feels fine and the corporate feedback stresses me out. There are some obvious answers about power dynamics and stakes, but there's something about the quality of the feedback here that feels different. I'm not just having different reactions to the same basic types of stuff.

One difference here: It's easier and more useful to give feedback when there's a specific artifact. In talking about the ideas in this essay with folks I realized that part of the reason I believe that I never get technical feedback is that a lot of the information I get about my technical skills just doesn't register to me as feedback. It registers as "a good idea," because I get it in the context of a specific problem, and there isn't the same performance/ceremony that there is in the creative classes that draws a neat little box around the reaction and makes it critique. I usually get it from people who I'm solving the problem with, rather than people who are purely observing me.

But I can't shake the feeling that there's something basically cult-y about capital-F feedback, at least the way I've experienced it. It reminds me of reading about struggle sessions and self-criticism. The goal isn't actually the object of the critique. It's not actually about "growth" or developing skills or even really improving interpersonal relationships. (Though it can help with those things!) It's about replacing the subject's internal self-assessment with an external assessment by the group.