How to get honest feedback from manager and team members

Question

I am about to start a new grad job at a top tech company, but I have a little bit of negative experience from my most recent internship. I was very proactive about getting feedback from my manager, I would ask for it in every meeting and he explicitly appreciated how teachable I was and how high quality my questions were. He wanted me to return there full-time so he brought up the topic with other team members and engineering manager.

In the last week of my internship I was told I did not get a full time return offer. Reason: relatively bad code quality (compared to a junior engineer bar). I was honestly surprised because I had been asking for feedback every week for the last 4 months and not once was it brought up.

I think what happened was I met my manager's bar (and hence he wanted me back full time), but I did not meet the bar of another senior engineer on the team who denied the return offer.

This means I have to make everyone on the team happy, not just my manager. How do I get honest feedback from everyone on the team?

Charlie Vuong · Accepted Answer

That's a difficult situation. I would say that it's unfair of your manager to solicit feedback from the team that late into your internship because it doesn't leave you enough time to address the feedback. Usually, your manager should have had regular checkpoints with your mentor to collect feedback.

Do you know if there was a rubric with expectations at your last internship? Sometimes you do have to take things into your own hands and cross check everything with your manager to make sure you're exceeding expectations. The issue is that people can be busy, and they might not have your best interest always at the top of your mind.

This means I have to make everyone on the team happy, not just my manager. How do I get honest feedback from everyone on the team?

It's hard to accurately comment on what happened during your last internship. If you were trying your best with the code and taking lessons from each code review, it's unfortunate that things worked out the way they did. It can be hard for someone to offer feedback when prompted, but I would just make sure to have regular syncs with the people that you are working with and just be very proactive with them about what you are trying to do and why you are doing it. Then, they'll be able to give more direct feedback about your thought process.

How to get honest feedback from manager and team members

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