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

Dear HN,

I'm working my first job out of college and I really enjoy it. I get to do fun computer vision stuff, write Rust, great pay, great benefits, short commute, etc. And my manager and her boss are both super smart.

However I'm a bit frustrated. I thought I was doing well - I'm working hard on the project I was assigned to, and it's coming along nicely. The deadline was pushed back once (which that seems to be very common at this company), and the new deadline is still in the future.

Two weeks ago, my manager's boss schedules a meeting with me and my manager. My manager is busy putting out a fire so it's just me and the boss, and the boss made a some of criticisms of me. I've been thinking about them and I can't shake the feeling that some of them were kind of unfair. (To be clear, I absolutely did make some mistakes on this project that contributed to it taking longer than it had to.)

First, he basically tells me this project should have been finished a long time ago and he can't believe it's taken this long etc. I had no idea that he felt this way before the meeting - I've mostly just been working to get it done before the revised deadline my manager gave me.

He looks at the code and criticizes design decisions, some of which were made largely on my manager's explicit suggestions. (When I bring this up, he says I probably just misinterpreted an offhand comment of hers as a hard requirement.)

Part of the reason it had taken so long is because I put a substantial amount of work into a part of the project that's no longer necessary due to changing requirements, which I don't think I could have forseen. I don't think the boss appreciates that and just sees that the amount of usable output is low for the amount of time I'd been working.

He did also make some criticisms that I thought were fair. For instance he said I should have looked at other projects to see how they accomplished what I'm trying to do. That definitely would have been a good idea.

After our meeting, my manager and my boss had a meeting with just the two of them to discuss the status of our project. I have no clue what happened in that meeting and I haven't heard anything about it from either of them since.

As of today the project is pretty much done (save for some procedural details). I'm happy, but I can't stop thinking about that meeting. I really did work hard, so it's demotivating that it feels like the result of me working hard is unappreciated.

I'm not thinking of quitting over this or anything, but it seriously bums me out. I don't know if I have a future at this company if the boss thinks I'm not a good dev, and I really like it here. A month or so ago they added someone else to my project and I trained him on my code, and he's super smart and capable, and I'm thinking that now they probably feel that they could fire me if they wanted and not lose much.

But the saddest part is that I really admire my manager and my boss, and I wanted to make them happy to have hired me, and now I feel like they probably aren't. I guess I can try to learn from my mistakes and get over it, but at the very least it feels like an inauspicious start.

How should I proceed?

Shrug it off and keep your head down. Keep on producing good work. Your manager should of deflected this sort of stuff and you are a junior developer. The responsibility doesn't really fall on you.

Take some notes about what you can do better on future projects and try and improve. Rinse and repeat.

Gj on delivering.

Talk to your manager about it, 1-1.

This boss telling you that they felt the project should have been done a long time ago: I wonder who that comment benefits? Feels like no one. You get bummed, they give late feedback without a lot of constructive aspects to it.

I am trying to think of one way it was useful to tell you that, but I can’t.

Seems like you should feel justified in not being a fan of working under this person. What you do with that is hard to say. Sounds like you got to work on a cool project and got to mostly solo it. That’s pretty great for a junior.

If you are writing code every day, it works, and your peers (not your manager) are using it to meet deadlines and ship more working code, don't listen to your manager. If your code has observations and design issues it shouldn't get merged unless everyone is ok with the tradeoffs, if it's being merged and people are not ok and you are junior developer, it's your managers fault and you probably need better process in the company as a whole.

But seriously if you are writing rust code every day and it works and none of your peers is visibly complaining to you, you are probably doing right and your manager is just not doing their job at filtering high frequency nonsense from chattering at the management level.