I am OK with being vulnerable but you can't explain certain things to ignorant recruiters, middle managers or CEOs. You can explain things to them but they will have an idealized uninformed idea in their head and compare what you said that to that. A good example is recruiters demanding 10 years of Solidity when Ethereum was launched in 2015. If you tell them that, they will get butthurt because you contradicted them or showed that they are uninformed about a topic, but if you just claim you have 10 years of experience, they will be happy in their bubble and hire you.<p>Of course, this is a different ball game when you are discussing with someone who also has programming / technical skills, for example, project managers with programming skills. You can explain certain decisions, troubles, and imperfections to them and they will get it. But someone who has no experience in the field will just make a negative assumption and run with it.
This is really interesting and I think a fundamental difference between engineering and law (my profession).<p>In the legal sphere the incentive is basically to act like everything is perfect at all times. Technically according to the law you can be sued if you had a wheelchair ramp work 364 days a year but be closed on one.<p>You can be sued for clearing 99pct of the ice from your driveway if someone slips on the 1pct. If you'd cleaned 99 pct of the driveway as a lawyer you would announce: we cleaned the driveway!<p>The engineer might opine about how she failed to get the last 1pct and why. The lawyer would tell her to be quiet because she risks being sued.<p>To my mind the engineering model is better. I don't like the legal model. But it is what exists, and I guess this is why we tell engineers to delete their Slack logs every couple of years.
I don’t think this is bad advice, but you can’t do that for everyone, not all the time.<p>First, make sure that feedback comes in a context of trust. Say it’s a vendor — give it after it’s signed. They’ll likely forget your name seconds after the contract is signed. Still, that’s when you are not trying to get something from them. Because of how they are focused on sales tactic, they’ll be tempted to hear your feedback as disingenuous.<p>Same: context is everything. Raising it in front of their boss isn’t always the best approach—especially someone as perfectionist for idiosyncratic things as sales middle-managers can be.<p>It has to be actionable. It has to fit the rhythm of the interaction. The person has to be in a listening mood, not following a script.<p>That’s why I recommend techniques to open all those doors: humour, especially self-deprecation, can be very instrumental to feel if someone is receptive to constructive feedback.
This advice only works in startups. In large cooperations its career suicide. Unless you really screwed up, then you might attempt to control the narrative fallout this way.<p>The asking for explanation never serves the gathering of information, never serves actual optimal solution searching. Its always a power move, trying to get people to justify them-selves, to knuckle under. All is a social power gesture, all is a attempt to crawl over the backs of others to some imagined position at the top of the silo.<p>If you encounter this, a company is lost to technology. Nobody will discuss engineering discussions, as all is "ammunition" for the eternal civil war of all against all, which might be used against you in some ritualized self-criticizing public execution, disguised as a code-review.<p>If people ask from you to be self-criticizing, its as honest as asking for your weaknesses during a job-interview.
I recently shared the reasons why reviewers rejected one of my papers with another PhD candidate I work with. He found this feedback useful and it sparked a good discussion about what he wants to emphasize in his current paper.<p>Even though in a sense we're competing for the same limited publishing space, we get more benefit from cooperation, because these kinds of critical conversations ultimately make us both better at our craft.