[timhickle]

The feedback mantra I follow as a manager is simple: "Feedback isn't about the past, it's about the future."

A lot of managers I know conflate feedback with critiques or praise, which are very different tools used for very different purposes.

Feedback in the interview process is invaluable, whereas critiques are unvaluable.

For example, here might be a piece of feedback that would help someone perform better in a future interview:

"During the debugging brainstorming work scenario, we liked that you brought ideas in many different parts of the architecture, but some of the best solutions we saw for this scenario indicated which options were most likely and grouped them by system or issue type."

That feedback is about performance and provides suggestions for improvement. In my experience, that's the type of feedback that's really well received and rarely debated.