> I can't think of a single time where having someone else review my work or give me feedback is a meaningfully bad thing. It's an opportunity to learn. But getting feedback is different to making the final decision.
Getting measured feedback is good when it’s coming from a place of genuine helpfulness.
I’ve been in multiple companies where, for various reasons, feedback rounds turned into a game of being maximally contrarian. It didn’t matter what you proposed, a few people would make it their mission to fabricate some objections and come up with reasons to rewrite it into something else. It was a way of exerting control and stealing ownership/credit by replacing others’ ideas with your own.
The most frustrating situations were when you’d rewrite something to accommodate some staff engineer or manager, then at the feedback session for the review they would complain and propose your original version, seemingly forgetting that they had rejected it once previously.
Getting measured feedback is good when it’s coming from a place of genuine helpfulness.
I’ve been in multiple companies where, for various reasons, feedback rounds turned into a game of being maximally contrarian. It didn’t matter what you proposed, a few people would make it their mission to fabricate some objections and come up with reasons to rewrite it into something else. It was a way of exerting control and stealing ownership/credit by replacing others’ ideas with your own.
The most frustrating situations were when you’d rewrite something to accommodate some staff engineer or manager, then at the feedback session for the review they would complain and propose your original version, seemingly forgetting that they had rejected it once previously.