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

1) Schedule a meeting with your manager and ask for a mentor. Tell them what their manager said and say that you want to do the best work you can do if they could get a good mentor, you will work hard to meet future expectations.

2) email your manager’s manager and thank them for their point of view. Tell them that you have taken it to heart and tell them the actions you are taking, namely getting a mentor to help guide you.

Don’t make excuses. Just tell them both you want to do the best job possible and want to learn.

Doing this without making excuses or sounding butt hurt because your feelings were hurt will elevate you in their eyes.

And you should move on and stop feeling butt hurt. Accept it, get the mentorship and learn. In the end it’s not a big deal but it’s a good opportunity to act the way professionals act and getting mentorship will help.

I doubt that this comment will surface to the point where the OP can find it, but just in case -- I'm not sure if it's obvious whether they're saying that you need to improve communicating or improving something technical.

One of the things I needed to learn in a real job was that if things aren't going well they need to know loudly and early in order to fix it. They can't allocate resources if they don't know things are behind.

If they don't see progress, what I hear is that they want more regular updates about what is being done because while you may be making progress on things it's not being recorded in a way that reminds them about it. That is frustrating and takes some effort to handle. You could send them more emails that feel unnecessary to you but are intended to make them feel involved and up to date. You could simply write down what you accomplished each week so that you can be specific about it.

I hope it works out okay, it sounds like either your manager needs to do a much better job backing you up or else there may be some maybe not too bad communication steps that can be taken to make them more confident about what is going on.

Definitely agree, I would say, if you think about something we might have fallen short (likely) go ahead and say it, the abilities to see your own shortcoming is gold for a manager.

They should be expecting rough edges with a junior dev, but if you are willing to talk about your weakness real or imagined you will grow fast.

Communication, you need to actively communicate what you're doing. I didn't really hear anything about how you communicated yourself throughout the project in your description, only what you said/thought at the end, and the merits and elegance of your code and how hard you worked - that's all nice but you're not being paid for elegance, nor for struggle; you're getting paid to get business needs accomplished on a timeline, maybe you can do that in an elegant way and maybe it'll take a lot of work but that's all largely besides the point.

Work in companies is largely about expectation management. You set an expectation for how long something is gonna take, how much effort something will require; if you're going to overrun that or things get more difficult than you think, then you need to communicate early and often that that's going to be the case. This is a large part of what makes professionals "professional".

If there's a problem that you have a potential solution to, you communicate that you're going to work on that problem—maybe your boss actually thinks it isn't an important problem and will stop you from wasting your time and energy on something that doesn't really matter to the end goal. Maybe they'll let you know that the requirements are changing and actually you should focus on something else, which yes you couldn't have predicted but yes you also could have potentially realized earlier.

That can only happen if both you and your manager/boss are communicating well. So hold up your side of the communication channel, and communicate when you think your manager/boss isn't holding up their side. That can be a sensitive and culture/person-specific challenge, though, but that's the challenge of working on a team.

There is little direct value to the company for you to struggle on something or feel like you learned a lot from doing something, there's value when you produce things that help the company get stronger, and no amount of struggle or effort really factors into that end outcome. Best result is everyone gets the most done with the minimum effort in the shortest time frame, no way that happens without a lot of communication.

There's a lot of nerd-rage voices in this thread (and in HN in general) talking about how your boss is the evil pointy-haired boss and you should set the company ablaze. That may ultimately be true but I'd take that advice with a huge grain of salt, these are random people on the internet with their own eccentricities and bones to pick from their own experiences, who have no idea the nuance of the situation you're in. Don't get indignant, it doesn't help anyone, if it really is bad you can decide that after you've collected more evidence of things you don't like about working there and leave voluntarily, but really doesn't sound that bad just yet and doesn't sound like you think it is either.

At my workplace, we have explicitly banned the use of "should have".