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Ask the ones who leave, but wait 5 months until they're comfortably settled into new employment. You can bet they'll give it to you straight, but you might not like that either.
Feedback needs to be anonymous or it will always be worthless. Few people have the courage to point out even blatant truths to their employer. Just set up an email that anyone can submit to anonymously.
Or, they don't really feel comfortable giving feedback about how to make it better. Maybe they already make such a good salary that they are afraid to risk it. In this case they are disincentivized from actually giving you the feedback.
Have you tried doing a hackathon week? No normal work except system operations but have everyone work on a new feature or streamlining of an existing process. Have you tried offering bonus for people who offer up new ideas and plans to improve the software and processes?
>> Any ideas how we can get feedback from our new developers on how to improve?
www.danluu.comYour developers are smart - they don't want to shake the tree. They know that even though you say you want constructive criticism, there's a good chance you'll resent them for giving it to you, so they take the safe road. Ask the ones who leave, but wait 5 months until they're comfortably settled into new employment. You can bet they'll give it to you straight, but you might not like that either.
Maybe instead of simple feedback it would be worth to just task the developer with improving something that they will see as problematic (kind of 20% time but for improvement).
Feedback needs to be anonymous or it will always be worthless. Few people have the courage to point out even blatant truths to their employer. Just set up an email that anyone can submit to anonymously.
Your developers are smart - they don't want to shake the tree. They know that even though you say you want constructive criticism, there's a good chance you'll resent them for giving it to you, so they take the safe road. Ask the ones who leave, but wait 5 months until they're comfortably settled into new employment. You can bet they'll give it to you straight, but you might not like that either.
Good idea. I personally had given feedback every time I left a company and the reaction was always either no improvement to slight adversity. So naturally I stopped giving feedback. Maybe instead of simple feedback it would be worth to just task the developer with improving something that they will see as problematic (kind of 20% time but for improvement).
Whatever you say, it can only make it worse.
Not sure what the solution is, but I feel like building a culture around "best ideas win" and rewarding the process of coming up with improvements and implementing them could be good. You could seed this at first with improvements you were already trying, but when people see "Hey, Joe Schmoe came up with this great idea and now we do it" would be a boon to your improvement culture.