Psychology and engineering: what is the right feedback?
Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with a professor of psychology. He researches how people react to feedback. I offered to buy him lunch in exchange for some of his thoughts. I prefer lunch over having to read academic research papers. It turns out that feedback from a machine is in general better received than feedback from humans. There are some important factors that influence how efficient feedback can be: • credibility of the feedback • accountability • fear of looking stupid/loosing credit All of this only gets interesting, of course, when it is not applied to real-life situations. Let’s look at how we could improve the quality of the HDL code that electrical engineers produce.
