Personal Feedback

At Color, we’ve recently been working on our first attempt at performance reviews. And by we, I mostly mean my manager and our new HR coordinator, but everyone is encouraged to offer feedback so we can create a useful and meaningful feedback loop. It’s my first time actually getting any sort of formal, professional feedback, since at Operator, the team was very small and we were light on internal process.

Normally, performance reviews are regarded as annoying, terrifying, or some combination of the two, but I’m actually pretty excited to see what will come of it. Recently, it’s been unclear to me what steps I should be taking to further my own career. Initially it was pretty straightforward: “learn how to build things” and “don’t write terrible code”, but now that I’ve mostly gotten past that part, I’m not quite sure what’s next. But I’m excited to hear about hwo I can be better, even though I already have some feedback I expect to hear (more manual QA before asking someone to QA, embracing YAGNI more often, manually QAing flows when I make even a small change).

What does it mean to be a senior engineer?

I realized that this could be something useful in my personal life as well, since feedback isn’t usually a common topic among friends. It can be hard to surface feedback out-of-the-blue in an informational, non-confrontational way. Yet, it seems really useful to know, especially if there are low-hanging fruit that can easily be improved upon. I heard about the idea again on a random podcast, and did a bit of research to figure out how to structure a survey. Here’s what I ended up with.

One of the difficulties I encountered while creating this survey was that I’m not clear what I wanted to hear. What are my strengths? What do I want my strengths to be? What role do I want to play in my friends’ lives?

What do I want to be?