I’ve got a beef with how feed­back is done in the work­ing world.

Our man­agers give feed­back dur­ing reviews– if you’re lucky, quar­terly. If you’re not, maybe yearly or less frequently.

And that’s about it.

Con­tin­u­ous feed­back begets con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, but I’m not see­ing any good ideas for how to get feed­back into my hands. If cre­at­ing a sys­tem for con­tin­u­ous feed­back was easy, it would be out there by now. This sys­tem should allow for con­sis­tent feed­back that is accu­rate and actionable.

From Y-Combinator:

Now that so much hap­pens on com­put­ers con­nected to net­works, it’s pos­si­ble to mea­sure things we may not have real­ized we could. And there are some big prob­lems that may be sol­u­ble if we can mea­sure more. The most impor­tant of all is the defin­ing flaw of large orga­ni­za­tions: you can’t tell who the most pro­duc­tive peo­ple are. A small com­pany is mea­sured directly by the mar­ket. But once an orga­ni­za­tion gets big enough that peo­ple on in the inte­rior are pro­tected from mar­ket forces, pol­i­tics starts to rule, instead of per­for­mance. An improve­ment of even a few per­cent in the abil­ity to mea­sure what actu­ally hap­pens in large orga­ni­za­tions would have a huge impact on the world econ­omy, and a startup that enabled it would be enti­tled to a cut.

Here’s an idea: why not cre­ate a sys­tem like what Face­book has in place for ‘Like’ing a web­site that makes it as easy as click­ing on a but­ton. Instantly, this infor­ma­tion is posted to my pro­file, and a counter adds total Likes on a site.

In a soft­ware com­pany, one has the lux­ury of see­ing what ele­gant code can do for you, and what prob­lems crappy code can cre­ate. Let’s face it– there is plenty of both.

So why not cre­ate a sys­tem that rewards the for­mer and iden­ti­fies the lat­ter. When I’m con­sult­ing with a cus­tomer and come across an ele­gant solu­tion that helps a cus­tomer, let me give props to the devel­oper and the hard work that went into it. Good doc­u­men­ta­tion? Props to the writer. A process that removes road­blocks and cuts down on headaches? Props to the implementer.

And what about crappy code? Code that is narrow-sighted or that solves one prob­lem only to cre­ate two oth­ers? That should get dinged.

Like­wise, if I mis­man­age my time and miss a dead­line, or develop code that breaks, ding me please. I like that kind of feed­back, because it allows me to adjust.

This kind of thing is more than a social net­work. It is a social pro­fes­sional net­work. Call it a ‘sopro’ net­work for con­tin­u­ous feedback.

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