ali_ibrahim

Here you go brudgers :)

https://medium.com/@aliibrahim_36896/story-of-pleasantfish-a...

Looking forward to your feedback!

Glassdoor allows you to see reviews of a particular company by its employees anonymously. PleasantFish allows you to see reviews of potential candidates(employees) for the jobs by their coworkers anonymously. It is a job recruitment platform that allows employers to get detailed insights about their potential candidates.

If the idea is to make them aware of it and help them get rid of it. Why not? :)

Exactly feedback has to be given on continuous basis and based upon the real performances on the projects. Not just on annual basis.

hey mikechar, thanks for your excellent insights. I think we can agree that whosoever wants to improve themselves they listen to the feedback given to them and who so doesn't its useless to them. So if someone really needs it there has to be a mechanism to be given to it (which basically i am trying to address in my startup i mentioned above in the comment i did). I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

hey koliber, good work at 15Five.com . Basically i am trying to tackle the same problem which is why i posted this question. I made a comment above summing up all the good feedback in this thread. Your feedback will be appreciated.

Constructive feedback is all what is needed and the only motive it should be given is to enhance individual productivity and grow him as a better professional.

Indeed a very valid point. Feedback has to be obtained at an individual level and it has to be given just for one purpose of constructive employee growth. I posted my comment summing up all the answers here and how i am trying to tackle these problems in my startup pleasantfish.com

Thanks for your responses guys! Some excellent answers were given. To sum it all up:

1. Feedback is great, it helps employees develop and improve themselves. 2. The way feedback is obtained in organizations is broken and somehow it acts as a tool by managers to penalize the employees during their performance appraisals meetings.

3. Feedback has to be given in a very constructive manner so that the receiver actually tries to improve it without feeling bad about themselves.

4. Feedback has to be continuous and we cannot except feedback to be delivered only on yearly or bi-annual basis. Real time, contextual feedback is needed.

5. Feedback not only on tech capabilities is needed but also on interpersonal relationships, management/leadership style, professionalism and much more.

6. Most important of all, feedback is a personal thing. It should be requested by the user himself if the idea is to improve themselves and to improve their performance and in no way it should be related to appraisals.

All this feedback is definitely used for improvement and growth and to make yourself a better professional. I had similar thoughts in my mind when i posted this question. Because my latest project that I posted here(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142878) and here (https://medium.com/@aliibrahim_36896/story-of-pleasantfish-a...) exactly tries to tackle the discussed problems. This is as we know a not simple problem (and also not easily understandable in the first go) so therefore my solution i believe is far from perfect but to start I have separated feedback from organization level to individual level just for personal growth purposes.

Also, to allow users to grow, i recommend articles/stories to improve those skills.

I would like to thank you all as I have gained valuable feedback information from this thread tech professionals and for growth feedback was a necessary ingredient.

Yes exactly! Cannot base the decision entirely on that but atleast the insights can be really interesting. It would be great if you can check out this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142878) and then give your related feedback. This is how i am trying to tackle this problem.

From the feedback that i have got from this thread, however, feedback is a very personal thing and users who really want to improve themselves don't have a solution right now where they can privately request their coworkers(former or present) for this information and not get potentially penalized for it (if negative) by their existing managers in the performance review meetings.

I still think if it incentivizes users in a very straightforward way then this is useful to them. In my reply to drakonka, i mention how it can be used in the career to be a super useful thing not only to them but to the companies where they work or intend to work as well. Do you think it should be done that way?

I have a rhetorical question here. When you say that anonymous feedback gives manager the idea of what working with me is like to my coworkers, do you think this information is useful for and should actually be allowed to share with potential employers and recruiting managers? Shouldn't they have a right to this information? For example: when a candidate mentions "references" on his resume, they are always meant to give positive feedback about them which is why again its broken. However, imagine of a platform allowing users to get anonymous 360 feedback from former and current colleagues and this information to be only shareable with recruiting manager of jobs they apply on. If a user shows certain transition and improvements ij their qualities then that would mean they're really working on the feedback they receive and as a hiring manager i would definitely want to hire that guy. Problem with that is a lot of people would never want this information to go out and made available to the hiring comitttees as it will reveal too much about them. However, that's the only way i find this fixable!

As a freelancer, its totally different. For them, i think recommendations and reviews are definitely way more important from clients which allows you to build a profile.

Thanks for your insights! I generally agree that feedback is important. Theoretically people should follow and gain from it. I started pleasantfish.com, a skills feedback platform where people could get anonymous feedback from their current and previous colleagues about their skills and qualities. But i generally saw people are either not interested in getting them reviewed much and even if they get feedback they are not much interested in improving upen feedback(asked through user feedback) which actually brought me to this question.

So i think somehow feedback has to be actionable and gives a plan of action to user in such a manner that he effortlessly tries to improve those things in his daily routine be it reading related articles or what. But users generally tend to be lazy which is why feedback in the end seems to be useless for them.

Yes! By colleagues we assume both former and current workers. We try with three things:

1. Allowing coworkers to write anonymous private message to the user.

2. Asking user feedback though rating system on their technical skills. Rate users as beginner, intermediate, expert and advanced.

3. 4 simple questionnaires with 7 multiple choice questions in each to get reviewed on their qualities. These questionnaires review users on their professionalism, collaboration, leadership and interpersonal skills.

The collected data from Point 2 and 3 above is then aggregated based on the colleague relationship (current has more weightage then former coworkers) and presented to the user in an easy to understand graphical format which basically identifies their strengths and weaknesses. In the whole, user identity who rated is not revealed in any step, we just tell user that he has been rated by one his coworkers in one of the companies he has worked and listed on his profile.

On top of that on each quality and skills, we have assembled list of articles curated from top sources so that user can improve these skills. He can also subscribe to other skills he is interested in learning and they are made available to him in his personalized feed.

Hope that helps!

For some months, I have been thinking about the same problem as well. From an employer perspective, Hiring is tough. Very tough! People list down tons of skills and qualities they may or may not have on their resume and problem is you need to have good interviewing skills to evaluate them and spend countless hours to have the right candidate. To me, a good measure of someone's skills is their feedback from their current/previous coworkers (if it can be somehow achieved in a profile and which is not biased so it can be anonymous). This way you are able to screen the employees. Not trying to blow my own trumpet here, but I am trying to address this in my startup PleasantFish where you can get feedback from your coworkers and as a user improve your skills by getting latest content based on your skillset in your personalized skills based newsfeed

Check out their employees reviews at www.glassdoor.com

We are super excited to launch version 2.0 of PleasantFish today.

What is PleasantFish? For tech professionals, a platform that enables them to get feedback on their skill-set and helps them get better by providing them with related top quality content.

Vision? Helping tech professionals grow and learn through continuous feedback.

Problem? Continuous honest feedback from colleagues in companies is too hard to get. Moreover, even if feedback is obtained and there are some weaknesses identified, improving them is difficult. Pleasant Fish attempts to take care of the two things by enabling user to get private feedback and improve their skill-set by top quality articles personalised to their skill-set

How it works?

- User lists down their current skill-set and ask their colleagues to give them private/anonymous feedback. - We provide skills-related content to them curated everyday that keeps them up-to-date - We also provide with relevant jobs based on their skill-set.

Looking forward to your questions and feedback!

Well, as the old saying goes: "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

I think its pretty much what I am doing. But the big question that pops up after a certain period of time: How long are you going to love something? 5 years, 2 years, 1 year or 6 months? That truly varies from the project i am working on. As long as its all fun, i continue the job. If not, i move to my next job or a next project. There are so many IT, programming jobs (for more or less money). I think what matters is that you are loving what you doing. So far, for last 9 years of professionally working at 8 different companies that has been my norm and I don't think it's that bad or worrisome.

Haha! This was awesome!

Down from Pakistan as well.

Thank you! The usage workflow is pretty straightforward. You are a professional. You want to ensure that your strongest traits and qualities (through verification from your colleagues) are visible to the world and to your potential employers. You make a profile here and just get feedback by your co-workers on different qualities.

Based on the feedback score from you colleagues on different qualities, we graphically represent all the traits you are given feedback on.

If someone is not an A* performer or has not received positive feedback on some qualities, he has total control on his profile to display that data publicly or not. Users create their own profile, so if they are not on the platform they wont receive feedback. Also, if someone decides to quit, he will deactivate his account and won't receive feedback from anyone.

They can always dispute a review and our content curator checks for random unnecessarily negative feedback (All negative answers) and remove it from the system.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our Professional Feedback platform 'PleasantFish'.

PleasantFish is a platform to get ‘real’ feedback about how you perform at your workplace by your colleagues anonymously. Its your professional venue where not only you can get feedback on how you perform but also give honest feedback to your colleagues and peers so that they know how to perform better.

Often we see that some very talented people are unable to get the jobs they deserve due to a bad interview. On the other hand, companies sometimes hire people who appear to have a great profile but when they are actually hired they don’t turn to be exactly an A* performer.

At PleasantFish, we have tried to address this issue by allowing co-workers to give each other real feedback on their leadership, personality, professionalism and collaboration capabilities through a series of carefully selected questions.

Their profile represents the feedback they have obtained on these different qualities from their co-workers.