It seems to me like that best predictor of whether you'll get the thumbs up is social cues, rather than anything technical.
I went to an on-site at a major company, and there was a guy who just wouldn't smile. He also led me down the wrong way on the tech part, which is easy when you make zero facial gestures and talk like a robot. I figured it out eventually, it wasn't hard, but he dinged me.
With the other people it was just a breeze. We chatted about various low level performance things, about how the work environment is, and so on. The tech parts were easy, because you could tell whether you'd actually understood the problem correctly.
Might be a bit of selection bias too. The people who had a neutral-positive reaction may not feel like they have much to add beyond "thanks" or "nice job", which sometimes feel like platitudes.
Probably just a pat on the back :-/ but I don't know since they were employed at a different company.
Nevertheless, my feedback towards their team lead was very positive, and that might have helped them too since they both collected a bunch of negative feedback while working with some of my colleagues.
You might need to adjust how you're praising people. A simple earnest slack DM of "thanks for the hand with that thing! i really appreciate you taking the time to do that" will still make people feel great.
Interesting perspective. Personally, I would find effusive praise of that kind profoundly weird, and uncomfortable, because it doesn't fit into the framework of mostly male-male communication I'm used to(relatively traditional, tinged with some ex-military vibes). In large part, the sign of doing a good job is the absence of criticism. Since you could almost always improve on your performance, there tends to always be some level of criticism.
Maybe I'm weird, but external validation doesn't really push any of my buttons. If you think I really did a great job, give me a bonus, or an extra day or two of vacation. Otherwise, I've got work to do.
Idk that's how I interpret the thumbs up after I say something. In my mind it's comes off like a dismissive "that's cool". Like what ever I said isn't worthy of a text response. Idk it's a little odd to explain I guess
In the culture of prefacing every simple question with empty praise, then all praise becomes an empty formality. It's far worse than receiving a simple "good work" after the job is done. If you have to choose between the two instead of finding some reasonable middle-ground, then you should choose the one that entails treating your coworkers like professional adults instead of emotionally sensitive children.
My supervisor at one of my first employers told me she should not be required to compliment anyone, because they will know if they are doing a good job if they still have a job. She never provided positive feedback and it was demoralizing to me.
I can relate. I've received many slack DMs from my peers telling me how great I'm doing on such-and-such project, and I'm grateful for their compliments, but at the end of the day, it does nothing for me, they're just empty words. My manager is left in the dark about what I'm doing.
I work in an environment where professional compliments are super common. It feels so icky and toxic. You can tell that most of the time folks are bullshitting, which is far worse than not hearing it at all.
Obviously, compliments are great and it would be good to figure out how to deliver more genuine ones, but I think you can swing too far in the other way pretty easily.
The 5 star thing is true. I've had a few colleagues who (in a metaphorical sense) always give 5 stars. It's actually quite infuriating - everything is good, so nothing can be better. It's much better to have a frank and critical conversation about something, with the shared goal of improvement.
In remote work environment compliments are generic and criticisms feel brutal. I feel like 80% of the time the notif sound is associated with bad news and deep down we are all Pavlov's dog. I don't care how people percieve no immediate reponses, because it takes me sometimes a lot of effort to see what I mucked up this time. I feel like a solution to this would be performance or surprise bonuses. But that is never going to happen.
I've never been able to find a way to be warm/positive/supportive/encouraging/empathic while also impressing on someone that their screwup might have cost the company six+ figures. Or worse - in some contexts, consequences can be kinetic.
Blood baths are not acceptable, but positivity is not always capable of effectively communicating consequences. Positivity works best when very little explaining of mistakes is required.
Sometimes an empathetic explanation that something should be better will suffice. Sometimes you encounter "It works, it's fine", and something more than empathy is required.
But, like major thumbs down on their vibe. They need more positive vibes.
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