How do you give difficult feedback?

Directly, specifically, and about the work, never the person.

I've internalized this because I know what indirect feedback feels like. When something is wrong and nobody says it clearly, the ambiguity is worse than the truth. You sense something is off, you can't identify it, and you start second-guessing everything.

When I give feedback, I name the specific thing. "This function is doing three things and should do one." "This API response is returning more data than the client needs." "This error handling swallows the exception and I can't debug it." Never "this is bad code." Always "this specific pattern creates this specific problem."

The harder version is giving feedback about how someone works, not what they produced. There, I lead with what I've observed, not what I've concluded. "I noticed we haven't shipped the feature we scoped for last week. What's blocking it?" is different from "You're not meeting expectations." The first opens a conversation. The second closes one.