Confused about positive feedback I’m receiving in 1:1
In my 1:1 my manager praised me for not getting upset or defensive when a senior engineer managed to convince me and my manager to change which interfaces we are to read from for the project I am working on. To be clear this is a 2 month project on a microservice with a lot of data translation requirements.
He liked that I just kept a unfazed appearance and refactored the code in 2 hours. I even shared that as a win to him :). But I’m confused why I’m getting praised. It feels like I’m getting praised for breathing. I’m a mid level engineer by self assessment so lmk if I’m not realizing some nuance here. To be clear the technical proficiency is not what I’m concerned about. I’m just more confused about what’s so important about that behavior I got praised for.
![Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fmeta.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Da7a5bcc0-e178-4b5b-b71e-09bf6c6aefae&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
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Discussion
(2 comments)- 2
6 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroPositive feedback is positive feedback: This is a nice win! Be happy!
Something I've learned is to never take anything for granted. To you, taking feedback well and acting lightning fast on it is like breathing. It's expected. And I agree with you that it should be expected.
But this doesn't mean that it shouldn't be celebrated. There are a surprisingly amount of engineers (not just mid-level but senior and beyond) who are completely terrible at taking in feedback (and are super defensive about it as you mentioned).
Another example is writing clean code. At Meta, especially at Instagram, that was the expectation. If you didn't do that, you would probably get PIP-ed. But whenever one of my mentees took the extra effort to make a pull request super polished, I would thank them for that in my code review comment. Yes, it's expected of them (especially if they want to get promoted), but that doesn't change the fact that it's an awesome thing many engineers unfortunately don't do.
- 16 months agoEng @ Taro
Your manager probably recognized that it can be frustrating to have to "redo" work that is already working.
But I’m confused why I’m getting praised. It feels like I’m getting praised for breathing.
Haha, that's a funny way to put it. From your manager's POV, there's probably no harm in making sure that you aren't upset that you have to refactor your code. You took the right action to quickly refactor the code, and it will probably reflect well from your manager and the senior eng's POV.
