[snovv_crash]

It doesn't necessarily mean that management is giving the feedback.

It could be coming from tests, from CI, from the QA team, from customers, from other engineers in your team, or, failing all that, then yes from management.

But if management is giving feedback that is hard to reconcile with everything else, at this point you can point to CI, the previous tests that were added based on other requirements, feedback you got from customers etc. as justification for your existing actions. It means you're operating with a lot less assumptions because you get data validating what you're doing (and where you should fix things) every step of the way.

[exitb]

If I had a perfect understanding of both technology and the problem domain, I wouldn't need feedback. Yet, usually we find ourselves in a different situation of less than perfect understanding of both, so we seek feedback to avoid going in a wrong direction. The less understanding, the more of it we seek. But there has to be a logical limit to that, otherwise we could come to a conclusion that things could be accomplished by someone with nearly no expertise, given enough feedback.

The secret lies in the fact that neither giving, nor receiving feedback is free.