Working in a small team and "negative feedback" / criticism is absolutely critical for us. For learning and improvement, to correct bad behavior and to write more robust code. But we are professional peers.

The issue with managers giving negative feedback is that they are either flat out not equipped to do so or they expect that their feedback can just be given without being involved with solving problems themselves.

What technical workers need from managers is that they explain problems _as is_. Then problems can be solved _together_, meaning behavior has to be changed up the chain as well.

For example it's completely useless and counterproductive to say "you're not on time" - yeah we know that. We don't decide not to be on time. Actually useful feedback is more nuanced and honest like "our customer wants to cancel that service they want to get rid of by end of the month, so they need time to enter this data by then. They only have two people working on that part time." - Now we're talking. We can talk about deploying a simplified, stripped down feature so we can take our time with the polished/richer version. One of us can schedule a video call with them to get them up to speed.

It's involving the _actual workers_ end-to-end that solves these kind of problems. Strip away the bullshit and the artificial metrics. Look at what needs to be done, what the actual problems are. Bring _that_ to us. Coordinate the right people (workers). Trust them to make sensible decisions and listen to their problems. That's useful _actionable_ feedback.