What Good Feedback Has Ever Existed at a Company?

Once calibration is behind you, the last homework left is delivering the feedback. After review season, when an off-cycle one-on-one shows up on the calendar, you already know what it is: the feedback meeting. You could almost say the trust you’d been building all along was being built for this one day.

What gets delivered

What gets handed over is a rating on something like a five-point scale and about half a page of writing. Sometimes it’s broken into fine-grained items with careful explanations; sometimes it arrives as a set of action items, a thornier kind of homework. You keep names hidden as much as you can, and treat the meeting as the place to say: here is how the organization sees you. Now and then a compensation number rides along with it — and if you’re the manager, deliver that part as calmly and flatly as you can. People are going to compare notes on Blind and levels.fyi anyway.

Writing it, receiving it

You write these messages in your own name, carrying the weight of the org, sometimes alongside anonymous reviews — polished in some places, made deliberately transparent in others. I leaned hard on translators, and built the thing out of the slightly artificial, careful English phrases I’d been handed. And I’d been on the receiving end of feedback like this myself — from my own manager. You write it because it’s part of the job — and from the receiving end, you might well say: what good feedback has ever existed at a company?

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You hope it gets saved somewhere a little more formal than the running one-on-one doc. It’s a handoff item: if you or they ever switch managers or teams, this is the first thing they’ll want to read. At Google, thirteen years of these records sat in one place. It’s a strange, impressive thing to scroll — lay the ups and downs out end to end and the joys and griefs of each season come back surprisingly sharp.

The one rule: no surprises

If I had to pick the single most important value across the whole cycle, it would be no surprise. For the people doing well, you have to brag about them often, long before the meeting; for the ones struggling, diligent early nagging helps. Defending someone who’s been doing well all along is easy. The reverse is brutal. And if you ever had to dress up the truth, you’d have to dress it up for a lot of people at once — so the lie, and the mess, only compound. The gap almost always grows in the places where both sides were careless along the way.

After the meeting

Once the feedback is delivered, there’s not much the receiver can do. There’s an informal appeal — but in practice it means going to your skip-level manager with some special piece of evidence that, for one reason or another, never got submitted mid-review, to argue you can’t accept the result your manager gave. It rarely works. It also asks the skip to disrespect the reviewers and the energy already spent, so it seldom ends well.

From the manager’s chair, the half-yearly cycle doesn’t end until the reports nod and take it in. (Google’s promotion cycle runs slightly to the side of this, and means something different.) The ripples are bigger than you’d expect. Some days it felt hollow — all that effort for a half-page document? — and some days it felt like the most worthwhile thing I did. Either way, the very human feel of those rooms still drifts back to me.

And in the AI era

In the AI era — I’ll admit I find the machine-read shorts and reels faintly uncomfortable. AI-written text is already everywhere in daily life, and these days I write nearly as much by prompt as by typing. But this — performance feedback, maybe the single most important exchange in a working life — what would AI-written feedback be like? It would surely say all the right things. I just wonder how it would land on the person hearing it.

Part of Lessons from the Company — first-person notes from inside engineering organizations, from my years at Google and after. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/170