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I work in a small company with no formal perf review system - How can I get feedback to improve?

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Junior Engineer at a small company2 years ago

I work at a small company with only 10 engineers. Since it’s so small, there’s no real feedback culture - We don't have a formal performance review system.

Everything I’m hearing is always positive - Everyone just tells me I’m always surpassing expectations and doing well. However, I know that there's a lot I can improve as I'm an earlier-in-career engineer. I want real feedback so I can get better and understanding the path from junior -> mid-level -> senior: What can I do to start getting this feedback?

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    Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
    2 years ago
    • Let your manager know that you treat all feedback as a gift and that you want real, honest feedback to become a more effective employee of the company. Make it clear it's in both your best interests for you to get this feedback.
    • Identify teammates that you can learn from and set up recurring 1:1 meetings with them to build those relationships to a state where they're comfortable giving you feedback.
    • Long shot: Try to add a formal but lightweight feedback exchange system. It can be anonymized by having the managers conduct it. Every 3 or 6 months, the managers ask their reports to submit feedback for their peers. When you receive the feedback, you just get the raw feedback: You don't know who it came from.
    • Code review is one of the best places to receive feedback as a junior engineer. Whenever you get code review feedback, ask commenters to dig deeper into constructive comments that you're very interested in.
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