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One Of The Biggest Tech Career Killers: Not Being Truly Great With Feedback

Feedback is the primary fuel for you to improve. Despite this, most engineers (and most people in general) are far worse at taking feedback than they think they are.

Here are the core points from the video:

  • Be very appreciative of your manager's feedback - Your manager is the main source of feedback for you (it's literally their job). Your goal is to create a virtuous cycle where your manager wants to keep giving you feedback as you make the experience smooth.
  • Be accepting of non-perfect feedback - It is very rare for feedback to be 100% accurate. Search hard for a kernel of truth in the feedback, and if you can find it, you should cherish that overall feedback.
  • Be extremely careful being defensive - This is a 1-way door. Sharing feedback is awkward. If your response to getting feedback is to make the situation weird and be the slightest bit defensive, that person will likely never give you feedback ever again.
  • Ingesting feedback has a high skill ceiling - It's way, way, way higher than almost everybody thinks. The most talented engineer Alex ever worked with got promoted from E3 new-grad to E6 (Staff) at Meta in less than 3 years. One of the main reasons behind that stellar growth trajectory is that they were able to process feedback extremely efficiently, almost always implementing it the week after they got it.

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