Ask HN: What to do if I'm a bad fit for dev team?

I have 5 years of experience writing ML software and working with distributed systems for large-scale data processing (10s-100s of TBs).

I have some hard-won experience, but I am by no means done learning. I try to be open-minded, and I've accepted that there's no way I'll ever truly be an expert in every aspect of SW engineering.

Four months ago, I joined a new team at a new company (my previous tech was purchased, and I wanted to move on to other projects). Writing code with this team has been a really difficult experience. Every change that I make I get pep8'd and abused on style. With each PR that I make, a long thread (>50 back-n-forths) ensues with comments like "let's put the calls in this file instead of that file", "let's actually put the code here in this file", "your code should be under 80 characters long", etc. What's annoying is that this codebase is a mess, and these comments appear to me as hazing as they are not uniformly applied to others: lots of inconsistent styles; really complicated class hierarchies; major violations of YAGNI; major violations of pep8. The codebase size is So being a good new employee, I've asked for a style guide and was handed this link: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/. I've been programming in python for 10 years, and I just found this to be insulting. I've worked on projects that are orders of magnitude more complex than the current one; and yet none of my experience matters, and I feel that I'm being viewed as a junior since I've been given smaller and smaller "projects" (if they could be called that) to work on.

I believe that my teammates see me as a bad apple. I want to do something constructive here, but I'm feeling pretty bruised and confused.

Thanks for any advice.

Maybe just move on, not everywhere will be a perfect fit and hopefully your next job won't undervalue you as much as your current one. Good luck!

You may be able to refute their recommendations with this video where Raymond Hettinger sympathizes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M

What does your manager/iteration manager think? Are they feeding you the same feedback? It's only a matter of time until it bubbles up to them so figuring out a plan might be appropriate.

When I first joined, I was working on a decent-sized project that required interfacing with other teams. My mode of development has always been to ask lots of questions, even if they're "dumb". I like "dumb" questions because it gets everyone on the same page, and it narrows the conversation. It's worked out really well in the past; I really believe in communicating early and often.

During my first week, I started down this path. I made comments in our chat, and was quickly told by my manager to take it offline. I was told that I shouldn't be "opening cans of worms" with other teams. So I had to be more discrete about understanding my new role, and figuring out Where the Bodies Were Buried in more round-a-bout ways.

That's the only direct feedback I've gotten from above; this is dysfunctional right?