I wanted to to tell you this last week as a reaction to your last piece, but it sounded like feedback, so I dropped it. It appears the result of my public musing on toxicity of feedback has resulted in feedback deprivation: a few people have admitted they would have given me feedback (also positive) on various things — but, because I’ve fallen off the feedback religion, they didn’t.

An exercise: Stand in front of a group, and say something meaningful on a topic the audience cares about. No, no, that’s not all, here comes the hard part: Now, look around the room (realistically: zoom room). Hopefully you see familiar faces. Now do this exercise in empathic listening: for each audience member (yes, this is a foreach loop), mentally put yourself in their shoes, or ears, or whatever.

I am very disappointed in all of you. Just a few years ago, when Joe had a baby, the whole company would chip in. We were able to buy a great present. And now, just 17 people out of 120!? What happened to you, why don’t you care? This is the gist of an email sent as part of a company-wide email thread attempting to collect some money to buy a present for a first-time father.

In the Netflix documentary “I’m not your guru” motivational speaker Tony Robbins is followed during one of his annual events during which a “small audience” of just 2,500 people (he often does events for 50k people in stadiums) come to a resort in Florida for 6 days, paying about $6k for their “Date with Destiny.” We get to admire Tony’s glamorous Florida home, just a 20 min drive away from the resort.

All hands meeting around the globe have taken a turn for the worse since the COVID crisis hit, as people have been forced to start working from home. I thought it was just in my company, but talking to some friends working elsewhere, it seems to be a pattern. Q&A sessions get more passive-aggressive questions than usual, seemingly ridiculous questions are asked, and a lot of frustration aired. What’s going on?

“I don’t often do this,” my boss said, “but I’d almost insist on you watching The Last Dance. Let’s talk about it afterwards.” My boss used to be a pretty serious basketball player. He often makes basketball references. “You cannot always be Pippen,” he’d say, “sometimes you have to be MJ.” Solid advice! If… well, you know who those people are, and what they represent. To get the right vibe while reading the rest of this post, and to ensure you have the proper experience, be sure you play “Step into a World” by KRS-One in the background.

I have a core belief. One that even when I mention it to people makes myself think: “Oh, that’s so cute Zef, I hope nobody will ever burst that cutesy little bubble of yours!” Ready? Here goes. People have good intentions. I know, right? So cute! Now I know, people do terrible things to each other and always have. I don’t want to downplay that fact. However, all of this horribleness seems to have resulted in many people assuming the worst in people by default, also in corporate environments.

I only heard the term “GoLD stack” a few weeks ago. As far as I’ve been able to trace it back, it was coined in a tweet (of course) by Santiago Martinez Q. Introducing the GoLD Stack: GoLang + Lambda + DynamoDB. — Santiago M. (@SocialQui) June 7, 2020 It stuck with me for two reasons: It’s a short, catchy name. It subtly alludes to being a silver bullet (which we all know doesn’t exist, but I still romanticize about).

In April I wrote about the No More Feedback book. Ever since it’s been in the back of my mind, and I’ve played with and researched some ideas on this topic. Let me share some of my musings and insights. A brief recap of the core idea of “No More Feedback” (in case you haven’t lost sleep over it like I have) — again, this is my summary of the book, not my own conclusion (although I do buy into it):

In a previous company, I had an engineer work on a feature for the better part of three months. The feature was well-specified, all requirements were clear. When the work was done, and the feature delivered, a demo session was organized. As the product manager demoed the feature, describing the scenario in which our customer would use it, the engineer said: “Oh, that’s what it’s used for? I could have built something different that filled that need in three days.