Ask HN: My boss doesn't think I'm doing good work, how to proceed?

If your a senior dev it’s part of your role to help the junior ones out. You should cultivate that behaviour as it brings up the quality of your colleagues and builds work relationships.

That really sucks. I think if you don't quit now then you will at some point in the future. Poor communication from above is not something that can work long term. Not only that, it's going to be hard to get out of the demotivation funk that this has created.

Anyway, don't let it get to you. I'd actually be a bit angry if this happened to me. Someone who is just out of college in their first job needs a leader to guide them and some basic mentorship - not this kind of shit.

Absolutely don't signal to anyone higher than you that you might start looking for another job. That's the worst thing you could possibly do and will leave you branded as a lost cause.

What manager is going to stick his neck out or put effort into a subordinate that doesn't even know if they want to be there.

It could also leave you in a compromised position under many circumstances if they wanted to get rid of you / move you etc.

This reminds me of a case of a director asking a "tough question" of a dev team as a way of providing feedback. I don't think the feedback was taken the right way in this case.

I was in a meeting where a group of devs were presenting a technical solution to our director, who was overseeing the product as a whole. At one point the director asks, "Did you look into other companies doing this and potentially licensing their solution to the problem instead?" All the devs were confused because they were tasked with building a technical solution in-house. I was confused as well because it seemed like a question the director should've asked a PM or one of the dev leads, not the grunts who were tasked with writing the code. The devs presenting were flustered by the question and didn't know how to proceed. The director continued with the line of questioning and it was clear he didn't like what he saw in the presentation.

The experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway, a couple weeks later, my manager mentioned the incident and told me he asked the director about it. The director admitted that he had only asked the question to get the team thinking differently about how they were solving the problem and cut through some of the technical details they were providing him. My manager thought it was a clever tactic, but I thought it was manipulative. I also think he just lost his cool since the solutions weren't to his liking and wanted to take it out on the team a little bit. I didn't think it was a great way of building trust with the team, nor do I think it made them think differently about the problem.

It's your first job out of college. To be honest you aren't a good developer yet. That might sound harsh but it's actually totally okay. I don't care how great your grades in college were, new grads don't understand how to build maintainable enterprise projects. They don't have ample experience to draw on when it comes to how best to solve a problem, because most of it time it's the first they've seen of that problem. Thrashing and failing is just part of the career. Having a nice long think over a post mortem is how you learn and grow. What really matters is whether you have a good attitude, if you can reflect and build on your mistakes, if you're pleasant to work with, and if you can gracefully give and receive feedback. You're not a great dev yet... and that's fine, because you're working on it.

The problem seems to be with your boss's expectations. So if I understand this right they gave a junior developer soul dominion over a CV project with evolving requirements and a tight deadline? That your manager isn't really reviewing your code and offering feedback on a daily basis? That you don't have a dedicated mentor? Of course you're thrashing. To give you a project and expect otherwise is stupid.

Look, I'm a firm believer in giving good people the support and tools they need to succeed, because I've never really seen it fail. People who want to do good will. I've mentored lots of junior devs and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. The one weakness I can't abide is if they're too full of themselves to accept feedback or hard to work with. If that's not you then you'll keep getting better. Look, you might think you like that job and maybe today was an exception, but you don't really have a basis of comparison and what you described sounds kinda wack. I can tell you with 100% certainty if your colleagues don't have realistic expectations you're going to have a bad time. The blame fest is coming. There are a ton of chill teams out there that would appreciate your time. Might not be as flashy as CV, but at the end of the day building Rube Goldberg machine business software is pretty dang similar. What matters is if you enjoy coming to work.