Feedback is an integral part of working in a team and managing people.
Code reviews, architectural reviews, 1-1s, and Sprint Retrospectives, are all situations that involve giving (and receiving) feedback as software engineers, product managers, and engineering managers. Yet, giving critical feedback can be a difficult and stressful experience. So how best to navigate these potentially adversarial situations?
George Saunders is one of my favorite contemporary writers. He has an excellent Substack called Story Club. In this week’s post, Saunders talks about giving feedback to other writers. While his advice is in the context of a writers workshop, I found it quite applicable to my work.
Saunders advices us to give specific yet kind feedback:
.. as we learn to analyze and diagnose with increased specificity and precision, the potential for hurt feelings diminishes, because we are offering specific, actionable ways (easy ways, often, ways that excite the writer, once she’s made aware of them) to make the story better. And who doesn’t want some of that?
George Saunders
Giving constructive or critical feedback is integral to working as a software engineer. Yet, these conversations can become challenging.
One might be tempted not to say anything or speak in the most generic and broad terms to avoid offense. Instead, as Saunders suggests, the focus should be on giving thoughtful, specific, precise, and actionable feedback:
In this [giving feedback], we indicate that we are on the writer’s side, we are rooting for her and are glad to have found these small but definite ways to make her story better. There’s no snark, no competition, no dismissiveness, nothing negative or accusatory about it; just the feeling that we, her readers, are coming together with her, the writer, by way of craft. We’re all on the same team, the team of art.
George Saunders
Not much more to add is there?