Engineering Growth: Seeking Early Feedback
It’s hard to draw on an empty canvas
One of the hardest lessons I learned in my career was learning to be okay with putting something imperfect out there. I used to spend a lot of time trying to perfect things before showing them to anyone. Whether it was a design, a proposal, or even a Slack message, I wanted it polished before it left my hands. And I thought that was diligence. I thought that was what good engineers do.
What I eventually learned is that this is a common, hard problem. And not just for me, but for everyone. Artists have a name for this; they call it blank canvas syndrome.
The pressure to create something perfect from nothing causes paralysis. The emptiness feels overwhelming. And the advice that artists give each other is surprisingly practical: Kill the White.
You need to start somewhere, right?
The Perfection Trap
As engineers, we love to perfect things. Covering every edge case, every input, and every possible outcome. It’s the nature of the job. And nobody wants to ship broken software or present half-baked ideas.
But that instinct becomes a trap when it stops you from putting things out early enough to get meaningful feedback.
What happens is you spend days or weeks working on something in isolation, building confidence in your own solution, and by the time you share it, you're emotionally invested. You're not really asking for feedback anymore. You're asking for validation. And if someone challenges your approach, it doesn't feel like collaboration. It feels like an attack.
I've been on both sides of this. I've been the person who spent way too long perfecting a design document before sharing it, only to realize in the first review that I missed something fundamental that someone could have pointed out on day one. And I've been in rooms where someone presented a fully baked solution and got defensive the moment anyone pushed back. In both cases, the root cause was the same: the fear of being seen as wrong.
The best advice I got on this was, “Be comfortable being an idiot.”
Your Title Is Not Your Identity
This gets worse as you get more senior. When you’re earlier in your career, being wrong is expected. Nobody blinks when a junior engineer asks a question that seems obvious or proposes something that doesn’t quite work. That’s part of learning, and everyone knows it.
But something shifts when you reach senior and beyond. There’s an unspoken expectation, sometimes from others but mostly from yourself, that you should have the answers. You start tying your value to your ideas. Your title becomes tangled with your identity, and being wrong starts to feel like it threatens both.
And the irony is that this is exactly what slows your growth down. The people who grow the fastest at senior and staff+ levels are not the ones who are always right. They’re the ones who are comfortable being wrong in front of others, because that’s how they learn the fastest. They put out the rough sketch, invite the criticism, adjust, and move on. They treat being wrong as information, not as failure.
Feedback Needs Something to Land On
This is where the empty canvas idea becomes practical. If you want useful feedback from your team, from your peers, or from your manager, you have to give them something to work with. A half-formed idea shared early is infinitely more valuable than a perfect idea shared too late. Because feedback has a shelf life. The earlier you get it, the cheaper it is to act on. The later you get it, the more painful it becomes, both practically and emotionally.
I’ve learned this the hard way more times than I’d like to admit. There were moments where I held back an idea because I wasn’t confident enough in it, and by the time I shared it, the window had passed.
And there were other moments where I forced myself to share something rough and early, felt exposed and a bit stupid, and then watched as the feedback from the team turned it into something far better than what I would have built alone.
Learn to Bring People A long
Seeking feedback early means you are bringing people along. It shows respect and collaboration. My point isn’t about speaking up every idea that crosses your mind.
When you seek out early feedback, people feel the ownership, and they are more likely to support you in more ways. It puts you in a position where you can upskill your peers and yourself. And on the contrary, late feedback puts you in a position where you it feels like you are trying to be a hero.
Real accountability is messy. It's sharing the ugly first draft. It's saying "I think this might work, but I'm not sure" in front of people who you want to respect you. It's trusting that your value as an engineer comes from how you approach problems, not from whether your first answer was correct.
Seeking Feedback as a Practice
The shift I had to make was turning feedback from something that happens to me into something I actively seek out. Instead of waiting for a review or a meeting where someone might poke holes in my work, I started going to people earlier. “Here’s what I’m thinking; what am I missing?” became a regular part of how I work.
And the thing is, once you start doing this consistently, something interesting happens. People trust you more, not less. They see that you’re not trying to protect your ego. You’re trying to get to the best answer. And that creates a dynamic where others feel safe to do the same. They start sharing their rough ideas too. They start asking for feedback earlier. The whole team gets better at iterating and learning together, and that compounds over time into something much more powerful than any individual’s polished solution.
This is what I think real engineering growth looks like at the senior and staffplus level. It’s not about knowing more or being right more often. It’s about being comfortable enough with yourself to put the imperfect thing out there, invite people to challenge it, and use that friction to build something better. Your identity isn’t your title or your track record of being right. It’s how you show up when you don’t have the answer yet.