Props.to.

Backstory part 1

I had the chance to join a very prominent software factory company early on my career. This company, called Globant, was just landing to Uruguay and I was employee lucky number 13. I was well into my CS bachelor degree and I was introduced to this big multi-national company. As you can imagine, it already had processes to give feedback to their employees, and those processes improved, mutated and became a very big equation to try to meassure how an employee, called Glober, was performing. Even bonuses were tied to performance evaluations which was also fed by colleague's feedback as well as your direct leader. Feedback became a thing very early on my career, a very mundane thing, something we all had to deal with and almost never remembered it existed up until performance assessments periods came to play in the year.

It was not a perfect process, there is no perfect process. Sometimes you got good feedback and impacted well, sometimes not. Luckily for me I always saw it as something useful, a tool to let others know your thoughts about their work, meassured by the values the company promoted. Those valueas actually mutated as well, new ones were introduced along the way. The feedback processes started to be more defined and new iterations of the feedback tools were released. Internally also helped to know beforehand if someone available to work with the skills you were after was an easy-going person or perhaps the person had issues before, which could lead to decide whether someone was fit to join your team or not. Feedback was a serious thing. It became a tool to help make decisions in the company. And even if it was not perfect, it felt that your effort, your feelings, other prople's perception of you and your work mattered.

Years passed and the internal tool for feedback became itas own thing, sellable to clients for their own organization. It made sense, our company's understanding of how feedback can help shape a better organization was certainly sharable with other companies. Give or take every organization strives for pretty much the same values, they can be called differently or have a more stricter way to conceive a value that other companies, but that's just a pretty simple configuration layer to their already implemented tool.

I have to say, I never saw any of the clients I was working for use or even have the slightest interest of using that tool continuously, but surprisingly, the feedback asked to the clients about their hired team was not directly made within that tool, that was just a Google Form or a very calculated exchange of emails.

Year went by, feedback was still part of how the company was set to work. I got a very fat bonus due to my contributions but also due to the oh-so-desired multiplier calculated by your received feedback from colleagues and leaders.

Backstory part 2

I'm not going to tell the story again about how I came into open source to work for a Commercial Open Sourece Software company as Cal.com. Here you have the full story if you are interested.

Long story short, I worked in this open source company that was a real change from the big established full-of-processes company. And they lacked a feedback process. Or should I say they lacked a REAL feedback process.