Feedback in IT: Why does no one like it?

The late ignition problem

Most IT companies make the same mistake: they collect comments for 12 months only to pour them out on the employee during one stressful hour. This is pointless. Imagine that your developer in March 2024 wrote a piece of code that didn't meet standards, but only finds out about it in January 2025. During those 9 months, he managed to repeat the same error in 14 other modules. Instead of correcting the course immediately, you let him drift in the wrong direction and then wonder why morale drops. At Mosty Zarządzania, we believe that feedback should be like a pull request – fast, specific, and close to the moment the problem arose.

Our observations in 43 technology companies show that employees who receive feedback less than once a quarter feel 34.6% less connected to the company's goals. These are not just empty numbers from an HR spreadsheet. This is the specific cost of recruiting a new person when the current one leaves because no one told them what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong. The average cost of replacing a senior developer in Wroclaw is currently about 42,000 PLN, including onboarding time and project downtime. Building a culture of ongoing conversation is simply pure savings, not just 'soft' caring about the climate in the kitchen over coffee.

We often hear from managers that they don't have time for constant conversations. This is a myth. Good feedback takes 4 minutes if given immediately. Waiting for an official meeting generates stress, the need to fill out Excel sheets, and unnecessary bureaucracy. If you see someone delivering tasks 12% faster thanks to a new testing method, tell them at their desk or on Slack. If someone is chronically 8 minutes late for daily, don't wait six months to ask what's going on. React now, because later it will be too late for any behavior change.

Feedback delayed by half a year is not help; it's a grievance. In IT, response time matters, also in communication.

The sandwich myth and other mistakes

The sandwich method – i.e., praise, criticism, and praise again – is the worst way to communicate ever invented in corporations. People in IT are intelligent and instantly sense phoniness. When you start with an insincere compliment just to 'hit' them with a specific a moment later, the employee stops listening to the praise. They are just waiting for that blow in the middle. As a result, your good words lose value, and the bad ones become even more painful. At Mosty Zarządzania, we teach boards how to use 'HR without the fluff'. Speaking directly does not mean being rude. It is simply respect for another person's time.

Another mistake is a lack of specifics. The sentence 'you need to engage more in projects' means nothing. A developer needs data. Instead of generalities, say: 'In the last 4 sprints, your velocity dropped by 18%, and the number of code errors increased from 2 to 7 per week. What can we do to get you back to your June form?'. Such a message opens the door to solving the problem rather than defending against an attack. When you operate on numbers and facts, emotions subside, and work on improving efficiency begins. This is exactly that facts instead of theory which is lacking in many Wroclaw software houses.

Remember balance as well. We often forget to praise because 'we pay them to do well'. This is an error. Positive feedback is fuel for the brain. It's not about patting each other on the back for no reason all the time. It's about noticing a situation where someone went outside the box, e.g., fixed a critical database error on Sunday at 9:00 PM or helped a new junior set up their environment in 3 hours instead of the planned two days. Such situations build teams that deliver projects on time, even when the deadline is tight.

How to implement real feedback?

Start implementing changes with a simple 1-on-1 system. Meet with each team member every 14 days for a maximum of 20 minutes. You don't need complicated software for thousands of euros for this. A simple notebook or a shared cloud document is enough. The key is regularity. If you cancel a meeting 3 times in a row, you give a clear signal that you don't care about the employee's development. At Mosty Zarządzania, we help set up such processes so they don't burden the leader's calendar and give a maximum return on time investment. We focus on what happened in the last 10 business days, not on the history of the last quarter.

We teach leaders to ask questions instead of giving monologues. Instead of saying 'you're doing this wrong', ask 'what challenges did you have with this task that it took 32 hours instead of the estimated 16?'. Often it turns out that the problem lies not with the person, but in poorly described requirements or technical debt you didn't know about. Feedback then becomes a diagnostic tool for the entire company. It allows catching bottlenecks in the software production process before they lead to delaying the product launch by another 3 months.

Finally, measure results. After introducing regular feedback in one of our fintech projects, the number of bug reports from clients dropped by 22.4% in the first half-year. Why? Because developers started catching their shortcomings faster thanks to regular knowledge exchange. KPIs tailored to code are not just measuring script lines, but also measuring the quality of communication within the team. If your people know where they stand, they work more calmly and less often look for a new job on LinkedIn.

A good leader asks more than they talk. Feedback is not an interrogation; it's a joint search for the way to the goal.

Specific action plan for this week

Don't wait for a new budget year. Tomorrow, choose one person from your team to whom you haven't given any feedback for a long time. Prepare two specific examples of their actions from the last 7 days – one positive and one to improve. Schedule 15 minutes for a talk at their desk or on a short call. Avoid generalities. Say exactly what you noticed and what impact it had on the project. You will see that the reaction will be different than during official audits. People appreciate when someone sees their daily work, and not just once a year looks at a table with sales results or delivered tickets.

If you are a company owner, check when your managers last trained in conducting difficult conversations. Often we throw people into leadership positions because they were great developers, but no one taught them how to talk to another human about errors. At Mosty Zarządzania, we conduct workshops that last exactly 6 hours and give ready-made conversation scripts to use immediately. Without theories about personality types, but with practical exercises on real situations from your company. This is the fastest way to fix work culture in an IT department.

The rule is simple: the faster feedback reaches the recipient, the less fixing the error costs. In IT, where changes happen day by day, an annual review cycle is like trying to steer a Formula 1 car using letters sent by traditional mail. It's time to switch to real-time communication. If you want to find out how to set this up for yourself without turning the company upside down, contact us. We will help you build a team that delivers because it knows what is expected of it every week of work.