End of Year Feedback
Hello everyone!
I hope this weekend went well for you! We did some dog-sitting with my wife; it was night and day between the 8-month-old puppy and our 14-year-old puppy.
Anyhow, I hope your weekend was more relaxed than ours! Onwards to this week's topic.
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In the past few weeks, the end-of-year review time has begun!
This means that we get a lot of feedback requests and have to gather documentation and write a narrative of what we've done. As part of these conversations, people have also asked me how to structure their wins or recommendations for feedback.
Be Proactive!
I first tell people to refrain from depending on their manager to know who to ask for feedback. Instead, be proactive and send a list of people you want to request feedback from. Your organization may allow you to gather this feedback. That might be easier!
But who do we ask for feedback?
Ask from varied Stakeholders.
It's good to start with the people you regularly work with, teammates, or peers from other teams. That might include other areas beyond engineering like Product, Design, etc.
If you're looking for a promotion, getting feedback from people on the level you want to reach is good. This shows that people are reaching out to you for information and have a good grasp of what being on that level requires.
What do we do with all this feedback?
Own the narrative
Your organization would have a description of what each of the engineer levels require or what their role entails.
Collecting your notes or writing down your wins during the year makes it easier to pull those into the narrative and align them with the expectations. Your feedback also comes in handy here, providing a backdrop of what other people think of your execution as you get those wins.
Generally, in tech companies, you must demonstrate that you're performing "at the next level" before getting promoted.
This means that between your wins and feedback, you should be able to tell the story that you're consistently hitting the goals of that next level! Demonstrate your impact on the organization by mentoring, working across multiple teams, organizing projects, or bringing people together under a vision.
Your Turn!
Let me know how you write your end-of-year review! Also, what tips do you have to share on how to write one or whom to request feedback from? You can reply to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- Thoughts on @oxidecomputer by Adam Jacob, thread on Twitter (X?).
- Scale vs. Efficiency by John Cutler!
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