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

As for the project, you should consider how much mentorship you received. If there was none, then obviously a high degree of mistakes is natural, especially for someone new to "professional software development" (if such a thing exists). If there was a lot of it and you blatantly ignored it, you should take responsibility for it.

Most importantly, keep a healthy work-life balance. It's easy to forget it, especially when first entering the workforce and thinking that you need to "prove yourself". Most of us are average; if you are too, accept it and keep living as best as you can. The 10x coders can keep on 10x-ing, but the world depends on the average person.

Yes, this is quite common. The problem is seldom on the performance of developers though, but rather on the misaligned expectations.

Your managers boss is probably stressed out about commitments or promises thy made that cant be met due to such expectations or otherwise really don't like being uncertain about a reality they have little control over. People generally hate uncertainty.

The solution “agile development” came up with wasn't to improve developer performance, or provide better plans, instead the main focus was to tighten feedback loops.

By having frequent “inspect and adapt” cycles with stakeholders two thing happen. First expectations are frequently brought into alignment making it easier to adjust other plans. Second it provides an opportunity change plans, thus providing more control.

It is my experience that stake holders provided with both expectation alignment and control tend to feel safe enough to not worry so much about deadlines and budgets.

Yep. And it won't be the last time. There are a lot of people who deliberately manage this way - in fact, a lot of times they're promoted to management because they act this way. For the most part, it's bluster and you can ignore it. It's really, really hard to find programmers and, no matter how good a programmer they found, the next one won't be as capable as you because he/she will need to spend time coming up to speed on the codebase as well as the rest of the company.

That is assuming of course, that you're actually doing the best work you're capable of. If you really are slacking off unreasonably, stop - but if you're not, then there's not much else you can do except be fatalistic about this job and take comfort in the fact that in our business, jobs are easy to come by.