Is feedback really a gift?

Hey there– it's been a minute. If you're curious about what else I've been up to, you can take a look at my monthly newsletter, Mere Being, as well as the development newsletter for the software project I've been working on, StoryTime.Otherwise– some corporate software thoughts–Have you ever gotten actually useful technical feedback? If I ever have I'm not aware of it. The closest things I can remember:"When you don't know exactly what code to write, you freeze. Try writing pseudocode instead.""You should spend some time outside of work reading Ruby books.""You should memorize Java's for loop syntax.""You're worse than your teammate at debugging problems based on logs from a system that said teammate used to work on."The first at least did improve my technical skills but it was actually process feedback.The other two were... not wrong? But not particularly useful, either. I spent about a year obsessing over that third piece of feedback. It was a relief, later, when a new manager told…