Technical Leadership

Giving feedback is one of the most high-leverage things a senior engineer does — and one of the most consistently underdeveloped skills in the profession. Most engineers who are technically excellent struggle with feedback because the skills are completely different. Writing good code requires precision and correctness. Giving feedback that changes behavior requires understanding why the behavior exists and what conditions would change it. This post is about technical feedback specifically: code reviews, design critiques, architecture discussions, and the kind of direct feedback about someone’s technical work that either helps them grow or falls flat. ...

Most engineers write their first RFC by borrowing a template and filling in the blanks. The result is a document that describes a technical solution in detail, lists some alternatives, and ends with an open-ended question about what people think. That kind of RFC doesn’t produce decisions. It produces comment threads. An effective RFC is not a document that describes a solution. It is a document that frames a decision — that lays out the problem, the constraints, the viable options, and the trade-offs clearly enough that reviewers can evaluate them and reach a conclusion. The solution you prefer is in there, but it’s one item in a structured argument, not the whole document. ...