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

> 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.

One of the things that I've experienced with new grad junior devs is that there's an adjustment needed to change from academic working to business working. In academia, usually the professor gives an assignment and you have to go off and figure it out, without bothering the professor, no matter what. In business, it's much better to 'bother the professor' regularly and check in affirmatively on whether the assignment has changed, or to tell the manager about challenges that arise to re-plan together. As a junior employee, you're not going to know the full business context of what makes sense, and checking in can save weeks of time that would otherwise be spent off on your own.

Not sure if that's the case here, but certainly something you could consider going forwards to prevent similar situations.

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.

The first meeting where your manager just abandoned you and you ended up talking to your manager's boss is totally inappropriate. Being so new to the job basically all the responsibility is with your direct manager and her boss is wrong to dump on you without your manager present.

I'd give it another chance though, sounds like the work is fun and maybe you can communicate your concerns to your direct manager.

Your boss is gaslighting & intimidating you.

- Do not be intimidated into thinking you did your work poorly. I've seen this happen many times with employees being guilt tripped, especially the younger more junior employees. You are a professional and the work you do is important for the company, you do it with pride and to the best of your ability.

- Beware of gaslighting. Some bosses can be incredibly manipulative and will resort to all sort of tactics to get more from you. They can have you attend more meetings than necessary because there's a deadline coming up for them. They might want to shift the blame to you when something hasn't been done in their department, even when it wasn't your job in the first place. When this happens clearly state that it is not your responsibility and that you do your job well and on time.

- Stop caring too much about company problems, and focus on your own work. You should not care if the manager does his job poorly or if the company is not doing so well. It not your fault. They are running the business poorly.

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.

I would have an honest conversation with your manager about the meeting that you had with the manager's manager.

Be plain and tell them that it made you uncomfortable and confused given your contributions to the project and the fact that you hadn't heard any negative feedback prior. Their response could be one of many. They could say that the boss is an asshole and just overreacted. They could say, "Actually, they were right. We've been disappointed with this project and think you could have done better."

If the response is the latter, it then really opens a whole other can of worms because if they have been disappointed with your performance all along, why are you just learning about it now?

Managers have responsibilities to their direct reports, especially junior devs to provide ongoing feedback and guidance. If that hasn't happened in this case and the project is considered a failure, that is a major problem.

I also think it's possible that your manager's manager is uncomfortable being direct with your manager. So instead of having a candid conversation with them, they used you as an emotional punching bag as a way to air their grievances. Which is totally inappropriate and nothing you should take personally, but is also something that should be considered a red flag to working for/with these people.

>but it seriously bums me out

Talk to your manager. If you don't have 1:1s, ask to have routine meetings. If your manager can't help you, alleviate your stress, or guide you forward, look for a new job.

It's hard to really say anecdotally if things were fair or unfair, but your manager's job is to help you (and selfishly, for you, they should help you grow in your career).

A few takeaways from an old-timer here:

> 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.

You need to communicate, build relationships, and get feedback from many people in the organization. One of those people is your manager's manager.

> He looks at the code and criticizes design decisions, some of which were made largely on my manager's explicit suggestions.

It may be the case that your manager is wrong, his design suggestions were dumb, etc. Or, it may not. This is one reason you need to get feedback from people other than your manager.

> 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.

Use this as a learning experience. Do not put work into things that may or may not be needed. The correct way to tackle a big project with changing requirements is to get something working end-to-end, possibly with a whole lot of copy and paste, hacks, hardcoded stuff instead of configuration, whatever. Then, when it is doing what it supposed to do, go back and improve it, rinse and repeat. Do not put lots of work into one part if other parts are missing, non-existent, and the project doesn't work end-to-end.

> For instance he said I should have looked at other projects to see how they accomplished what I'm trying to do.

This is great advice. It is often the case that if you ask the right question/person, someone will say "oh, yeah, I already did that, here's the code." or "I tried that last year, and it didn't work". Or, they might not, but the only way is to ask around, talk to people. This also goes back to the first point, build relationships with people other than your manager, because your manager doesn't know everything, and is probably wrong about a bunch of stuff.

Putting on my (thankfully former) manager hat, I'd say that you are bearing the brunt of your boss's poor planning. As others have commented, you getting blamed by a skip-level manager is a bad sign and something is off. But, now that you know that, don't turn around and blame your manager for it or make a big stink. It will not be in your favor to make a big stink, especially if it's to take sides against them in a public way. Your relationship with your manager is important, so you have to find a way to move forward that doesn't inject more bad blood into the situation. Try to keep your conversations about this confidential--don't go blabbing about it and loudly complaining. It can make the environment toxic. As the low person on the totem pole, you might just get shown the door.

Going forward, make sure that expectations are clear. Particularly requirements! Make sure you have requirements spelled out, on paper, over email, in planning documents. Make sure you point out when requirements change, and do it over email or paper, or some durable medium. Don't let situations get murky and rely on faulty memories. In short, try to be the organized, rational, delivering engineer that puts in good work and reliably delivers. If your management doesn't have the attention span or organizational skills to spell out plans and requirements, then it's going to be on them when failure occurs.

Things not being on time is almost always management's fault. They set timelines. They set expectations. They have the power and make the decisions. As long as you are giving them good estimates and delivering, it's definitely their fault if things slip.

edit: I will add that you don't need to keep what you are working on confidential. Talk to your coworkers and friends about your technical challenges all the time. Just don't bad mouth your project or your manager.

I will preface my comment by saying I'm a little later in my career, and consider myself a little more cynical than average. The following is only useful in the company of other comments to offer a more balanced perspective...

I would have found it entirely unacceptable, and my notice would have been on the table within the hour. I've handed in my notice for less.

That kind of behaviour from leadership/management is terrible. Depending on the type of person, it can plant a seed of resentment and disillusionment that will make them hate the work, or create/worsen confidence issues. Employees are people. Of course, some people will shrug it off or perhaps even use it as motivation to get better who knows.

I would also be suspicious of the manager who ducked out the meeting.

The fact that you're on HN posting about this shows that it has already had a negative impact on you. You should be enjoying your time off, but you're just thinking about work.

How should you proceed? Depends on the type of person you are, and your ambitions in your career. Both those will change throughout the years to come. My advice - just do the job, enjoy yourself, get paid, and apply for the next role whenever you feel like it. You will not be on your deathbed wishing you'd gotten to the bottom of this incident.

The one time I ran into a scenario like this it was an upper level executive looking to flex and show that they are the alpha. My manager and manager’s manager stayed after the meeting to tell him that my project met the specs perfectly. Later on I found out that every person who had been in the department over a year had gone through that exact scenario. I kept on working and ultimately it was fine, but the department had a lot of churn with people mentioning this practice in their exit interviews, end result was him getting promoted even higher.

Keep your head down, and use the time wisely to line up a new job. No need to accept anything just yet, but start putting out feelers.

If your boss is saying bad things about your work while you're in the room, you can bet your bottom dollar it's amplified when you're not there.

One way things may play out is in the review cycle, if things are coming up negative there, with no positives, then you can throttle up the job search.

Either which, look after yourself first and don't let them pull the rug from under you with no options.

I would say something like:

Wow, actually that feedback is quite surprising to me. I’ve been working hard on the project, and all the feedback I’ve gotten until now is that it was coming along nicely. A lot of the design decisions you pointed out were direct suggestions from (manager) and I thought I was doing a good job by implementing them thoroughly. Maybe we should have this meeting again with all of us in the room?

The first thing you should do is go to your direct manager and discuss the feedback you got. See if they feel the same way. One of three things is happening. Either your boss went off on you without communicating with your direct supervisor.(unlikely) Or your direct supervisor feels this way and is too chickenshit to them yourself. Or they are throwing you under the bus.

The second thing you should take into account when planning your career is you probably aren't going to promoted under this boss.

Third thing is "welcome to the corporate world!" You probably need to do two things more often. One is request feedback from your direct supervisor more often. The second is let people know what you're doing, how you're doing it, and what circumstances are holding you back. Basically if someone changes something and that means you're going to miss your deadline let everyone know in via email. If you run into any issues that will delay the project, again send out an email explaining the issue why it was unforeseen, and how it'll impact the deadline.

This is pretty sucky, either you have two bad managers or you have a bad manager and another who was having a bad day. Either way, this is largely more a reflection of them than you.

But that doesn’t help you, what does is a concept commonly known as “managing up”.

You need to manage your manager to get the best out of the situation. Good communications are key, you need to provide regular updates that are easy to digest and that can be referred back to later. If you have a decision to make that you want their input on then ask but also propose a solution and, if you are right on time, tell them that you will proceed with you proposed method if you haven’t heard back from them by X time.

You can’t change the past but you can learn from it and implement this kind of thing.

Also, a trick to do with sneaky managers you don’t trust is to make these updates in channels with other people in on Slack/Teams etc. This is why email CC hell occurs, you’re basically covering your ass BUT if it’s in a group chat you can call it “desiloing, knowledge sharing” etc.

You’re fine, you just got burned by rubbish people, there are a lot of them, manage them and your life will be easier.

Also, if you’re a fresh grad and been left totally unattended and you’ve basically hit the deadline then you are not the problem. Expectations on new devs are very low usually.

A lot of good points have already been made. The feedback isn't actionable. What's your right of reply? This is especially difficult since you're a junior and don't know the protocols. Perhaps you should be more comfortable interrupting your manager/other stakeholders with progress updates/regular questions (again, difficult for a junior).

What strikes me the most is the absence of your direct/immediate manager. While the praise in public, criticize in private principle isn't being directly violated here, something like it is. Your immediate manager's responsibility is managing you, and to a degree this includes protecting you. This kind of criticism should be passed through the chain of command and only be delivered by your direct manager. Their job is made harder by the introduction of ambiguity by being excluded from this conversation. (Healthier work places can operate differently but you've already demonstrated it's not a high trust environment where you are allowed to jump the chain of command in the interest of getting things done. I've only seen this work in a few teams.)

I think the gaslighting comments may have more merit than others. I'll be clear: this is about someone in authority telling you how things are and this directly contradicts with your knowledge of the situation. There is at least a modicum of this in your description of events, but it's probably not the most important issue here.

A few others have said it but I'll repeat: talk to your manager about this.

One of a manager's many responsibilities is to be a "shit umbrella". This means taking the often direct, often unfiltered (often ill-informed and ill-considered) feedback of higher-ups and filtering down to only what you need to hear to actually help you do your job. And conversely, when these opinions are shared, another responsibility is to "manage up" and guide or reset expectations, filling in gaps.

When the umbrella is absent, we all get drenched. It happens to everyone at some point.

One reason this experience was so shocking is because it came entirely out of the blue. That was probably by design of your manager - they didn't share these concerns about your project because you don't need to hear them right now. Your manager knows the project is overdue, your manager knows they need you working on other things ASAP. And your manager also knows you, your strengths, and some areas that can be improved. And your manager is... managing all those variables.

These aren't things you should have to worry about at this stage of your career. And chances are, what the higher-level boss says about your current project has little correlation to your security at the company. It's just brutally unfiltered (and unhelpful) feedback about the project. The only person with enough context to have that conversation is likely your manager.

Talk to your manager about the conversation you got stuck in and your concerns. You'll feel a lot better after.

Unfortunately alot of people don't know how to manage junior developers well.

Take it from me - you are FINE - you are doing well. I know this because you have the right attitude and you are working hard - these are the primary factors that determine how a junior developer is doing.

Do not be disheartened by the incompetence of your managers.

You are at the beginning of your career - keep doing exactly what you are doing.

In time you will find you have suddenly levelled up. Keep working hard and every few years you'll jump in level again.

Start looking for another job now - get out of that place because your career there is finished and your management are incompetent.

Time to start looking for the next gig. That boss is unsuitable for management. Lacking emotional intelligence, willingness to mentor, and so forth.

I've never successfully managed upwards, never have been able to turn situations like yours around. I've had jobs that I really liked, so tried really hard to make things work.

It was never worthwhile. I always regretted the effort.

The good bosses I've had made all the difference. And why I happily stayed in gigs, despite other offers, despite red hot job markets, despite more interesting work.

Life's too short. Don't stress the losers any longer than it takes to get away.

Write down all the criticisms & comments and add two columns : fair, actionable. Go down the columns and honestly put a tick in the boxes - if its a fair comment and if it's actionable. If you have any with two ticks then that's a learning point. This is great - you have a gift. Then decide what to do about them, you will get some progress and something to talk about in your interviews in the future.

Ignore the rest - there's nothing you can do about imaginary problems. If you get fired for them then you are being fired for an arbitrary reason, nothing to do with you - everything to do with them. If you ignore the real, actionable comments then that's on you - it will probably be fine in the long term - but not as good as it could be.

There's lots of good advice here already but one thing I don't see suggested is whether this might be laying the groundwork to let you go... and that might not be related at all to your ability as an engineer/developer.

It's not uncommon for companies to use "Performance Improvement Plans" as a structure for this. You get set targets that are difficult to reach and when you don't reach them, they conclude you're not a good fit. They're awful.

My advice would be to look out for this. If it starts being mentioned, it's time to start looking for work elsewhere. Try not to buy into the idea you're no good, they never fostered the opportunity for you to be excellent.

I'm sorry to read your experience so far. You seem passionate and willing. While it'd be proactive of you to look at other projects it's a red flag to me your manager would be critical that you didn't think to do that... why would you? They should be setting the standard and it's pretty clear from their comms they're not.

Best of luck.

This is a classic case of miscommunication: there's evident misunderstandings on both sides, and that's totally normal, since no human is a perfect communicator.

My advice (as somebody who's been in your shoes), since this is the only occurrence of this behavior so far, is to reach for mercy instead of justice and try to obtain her point of view through direct, good-faith conversation. Even if you disagree with her priors or decisions, you'll learn something valuable. Emphasize that you don't hold anything against them but just want to learn from the situation, and no egos will be injured.

People on the internet can spend all day pontificating on what she or you might have meant or felt, and what the greater ambitions of yourself or herself might be, but it's all futile because (1) it doesn't solve the problem for you (2) none of us know you or your manager. Instead of reading every comment on this thread, my advice is to schedule some time with her and air it out. Good luck!

A company puts a newly graduated student alone on a project... It's on them.

The buck stops with the manager in these cases. He's blaming you for something that's 100% his fault.

Talk to your direct manager and tell him about this. He should have been at the meeting and he should have guided you.

It isn't like this in other companies. You're doing great, dealing with a complex rust project right out of college is tough. You're expected to carry on your own in every project. But your manager has the responsibility to keep the finger on the pulse. Gauge shifting requirements and make sure everything works smoothly for you. At this stage your job is to code and report.

Project delays happen, that's just inevitable. If a manager makes you feel small they're a bad manager. Empathy to subordinates is the most basic skill a manage should have.

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.

"my manager and her boss are both super smart"

That doesn't mean they are good at growing staff. In our industry that seems to be lacking big time.

You need this sort of feedback but it should probably have come from your manager. You said your manager was too busy. It sounds like the company is struggling to meet deadlines. There must be a lot of pressure on your management. That might mean they don't manage you very well .

Don't get down. You were probably very good at university and now as a junior you have a lot of growing to do. That's a shock many of us face. You will always have a skill set in demand. Learn as much as you can here. If you don't like it you can move on. Don't let your confidence get shaken.

A lot of a manager's job IMO is to shield his devs from this kind of deadline pressure and negativity. In the past I've worked under some managers that explicitly told me take my time and get it right and not worry about the deadline. After shipping one of those I later found out that the product manager was so upset with the delay that he was about to call a huge war-room and start micro-managing the project himself. I had no idea we were a week away from that or that anyone was even upset. When I brought it up with my manager he said, that's cause I didn't want you worrying about that. The scale on this one is too important to rush through. He took a lot of heat and deflected it to the point I was totally oblivious and just focused on coding.

I'm not saying this is necessarily always the right approach. It could have back-fired if my manager had judged it wrongly. But what I'm trying to say, is that manager would have never left me alone in a meeting with the PM exposing me to the scenario you describe. Eventually, as I grew more senior it was useful to be exposed to that, but at that point in my career, I really appreciated being shielded from the politics while I just focused on improving my craft.

I doubt if your manager really had to miss the meeting to put out a fire. It feels like things were set up so that your skip-level manager could upbraid you about your work. One possibility that does explain it satisfactorily is that your manager was promoted recently into people-management, and your skip-level manager is still handling some of the performance management conversations. If this is not the case, this is something of a red flag.

In the same vein, it's very unusual for your skip level to have a meeting about this and talk about design, code etc. People at that level typically do not get involved in things at this level: in fact, your manager is the one who will have a lower-level involvement.

Alternately, your immediate manager is leaving or being fired and your skip-level manager is taking stock of what he's going to have to deal with in the near future.

In either case, it does not look like a good situation. You should interview aggressively and take a new position, even if you really are at fault. Impressions of someone as a bad performer almost never go away, and it is rarely worth the effort to stay to fix that impression. You are better off being able to get a reasonable reference while things have not escalated.

I am yet to see a project of a reasonable size where its success or failure can be contributed to a single person - it is always a group effort. A good manager always knows how to distribute work and manage things so that even underperforming/sick/demotivated/frustrated people (things happens) are still delivering value so that the things are moving ahead no matter what. Looking back and pointing fingers is a useful as looking for a toilet after shit already happened.

People's behaviour/actions/attitudes should be adjusted while we are in progress and any reviews/post-mortems/retros are normally embarrassing and offensive and non-productive as we are not given a chance to do differently which brings frustration and breaks the spirit rather than improves things.

The only thing that matters is people around you, not technology, or projects or anything else. We spend more time with them than with our parents or partners - but the good thing is - you can always ditch them - not that easy with the parents or partners )))

I quit my last job over less than this, and I felt really uncertain about it at the time, but my career growth, compensation growth, and intangible feeling of management support have all been massively better at my new place - and I found it by being randomly contacted by a headhunter. My old job wasn't bad nor was my old manager, there just wasn't a fit between what I wanted to do with my career and what my employer wanted to do with that role. The immediate trigger was that I had a conversation much like this one where I thought I was being treated unfairly, and in retrospect I wasn't really, but in fact it was a good sign of that mismatch.

So I do want to encourage you to keep your eyes open for other opportunities. If you're a Rust coder working on computer vision stuff, and you're early-career enough that you're not particularly tied down as a person, you have a lot of options.

As a manager, I have learned that when projects are delayed, 9/10 it is due to bad management (of either the direct manager or the project manager).

Conditional of course that the developer has a sufficient amount of skills and is motivated, which you seem to be.

In my early experiences as a manager, I was frustrated when projects where not delivered on time, and below the expectations. After several iterations on self-evaluation and attempts to do things differently, I eventually found out that structure on the planning, and having a common understanding of the requirements are the key to a successful delivery. As a consequence, I spend now more time on the actual planning (up to 15% is allocated to this), and ensure that everyone has understood the expectations fully.

Those people that I was complaining about before, turned out to become extremely valuable to the company.

The problem here isn't the feedback. The problem is the surprise. It's on your management chain to reduce surprise. Concrete achievable actions on your part are:

* Ask for weekly 1-1s with your manager

* Proactively bring up the subjects of difficulty here.

  * This means you bring up the subject of how long it's taking etc.

  * Don't be afraid to look stupid. It's her job to make you non-stupid if you are.

* Ensure progress is both real and visible to every level. It might not be that easy for someone fresh out of uni.

* Don't get too down on it. You are at the beginning of your career. 10 years from now it'll be a memory you can only bring up with conscious thought.

First, make sure you’re not over reacting to negative criticism. Remember, you paid your university and rated your professors. As a result, they probably coddled you to an extent. Now you’re in the real world, people are going to be brutally honest.

Second, ask for constant feedback. I try to ask my boss what I should keep doing and what I should start doing and if there’s anything I should change.

This serves two purposes. It helps me grow and make sure I’m meeting expectations. But it also serves as an anchor for your boss to also think about you in a positive frame (I’m assuming your boss likes at least some of what you’ve done, otherwise you’d be gone).

Haha! Gotta LOVE this forum: Ok, after reading 242 comments, I have summarized them for you:

Your Boss is Good -> Your Boss is bad

You should keep your head down -> You should keep your head Up

You should quit -> You should NOT quit

This is really good advice -> this is really BAD advice

Go to HR and record this -> DON'T go to HR because [bad]

Tell your boss FU and leave -> Be humble and learn from this

Your boss will Never EVER get better -> Your boss just had a bad day, etc.

---> more entries to be filled by more good/bad responses (equal amounts)

The ultimate take here OP, is that you get here the same you will get inside your own company, that being a S/N ratio of ZERO. Go with your heart. (oh, I just HAD to add that, lol)

Start updating your resume and applying for other jobs. If you don't like it there then you will always have a gap between your performance and being happy.

One of the responsibilities of your manager is to deal with a lot of this stuff for you. It can be nerve-wrecking as a new grad, but one of the things I would do in your shoes is have a 1-on-1 meeting with your manager as soon as possible and explain what you have said here: what was said in the meeting, what you felt was fair / unfair criticism, that you plan to learn from what was fair, but that you're concerned about the unfair perception they may have of you. Get their advice. Ask them to help do some damage control of your reputation if that's necessary.

Your boss's boss didn't do a good job communicating. Your boss didn't do a good job communicating. You didn't do a good job communicating.

The nice thing about it is that if you focus on really good communication, you can almost entirely solve the problem yourself. You can give status updates, you can ask questions, you can set up 1-1's to go through what you are working on and get advice. You can control a lot more than you think by being a really great communicator and being organized. It does take work and organization, but you can do it.

Just relax and try to learn the most that you can from this interaction: This person could be on a bad day or be a natural asshole, maybe you did misunderstand your manager comments, you definitely should have looked at other projects and most importantly, now you know how not to give feedback to someone else.

Anyway, this is your first job and you are playing a very long game. Don't let a single interaction determine how you feel. As many others already mentioned, you can also talk about it with your manager to figure out what happened.

Welcome to adulthood it sucks, youre gonna love it.

If you manage to find a workplace that does not sport atleast one manager that does this, consider yourself lucky.

My advice, look for truths in what he said ( I am sure he was correct on some aspect somewhere ) and work on that. Ignore the rest and move on.

Hey mate. This situation is pretty common in my experience. Its not your fault, its bad management but by the same token bad management is so common in software development you need to develop some defence against it so in future i recommend the following:

1. Make sure all your time is tracked on a file you control. Don’t necessarily share that information freely but it might be useful to you if you need to explain stuff layer to answer why something took so long.

2. Always have a written down scope and when it changes make sure there is evidence and record this with your time log. (If its exploratory work then the scope might be what you intend to learn rather than deliver)

3. Always send an ass-cover email saying “scope has changed and here is a revised estimate”

To be fair for your first job out of college they are treating you pretty badly and my gut here is after getting your 2 years to prove to are not an early quitter it will be time to move on, and when you do expect a big salary jump.

Unless you are a master negotiator they are probably paying you half what you can get elsewhere.

Also I wouldn’t trust their knowledge or opinions based on what you said, so make sure you learn good Rust practices outside then org from trusted friends/colleagues/courses so when you get the next job you look smart.

You also have a good story for the “tell me about a situation questions” so make it a great story bu being a pro, improving the stakeholder management (communicate project and estimate changes more often) and then show the next employer you are awesome!

Tell your manager that you are scared by what happened in the meeting with the skip manager and ask if they want you working for them or if you should start looking for another job.

Most likely you should leave in this situation, because if your skip manager thinks you suck, you don’t have much of a future at the company. They will likely need to approve promotions, raises, etc.

However, you don’t have much to lose by being very open with your manager and seeing if the situation can be repaired.

Have you gone to your manager and discussed the meeting? Start there, One on one.

Just tell them what their boss told you and go from there.

Take any criticisms with a grain of salt. While they may be valid they also may be their own frustrations seeping through.

Talk to your manager about it, 1-1.

Sorry that happened, sounds like it was a very difficult experience. Talking this through with your manager or a trusted coworker is definitely going to yield better advice than what people can offer without context. However a few thoughts:

1. Treat individual bits of feedback as one of many inputs to career growth: Feedback isn't infallible, even if it comes from smart / experienced people. It is tinged by personal quicks and biases, and often comes from a place of incomplete context. There are valuable things to be learned from it, but you should use each bit of feedback to update your existing priors rather than throwing out everything you previously believed.

2. Perception and reality are not the same: A dirty secret about "work" is that the perception of your work is often more important to advancement than the objective quality. I think it's helpful to keep that in mind when reflecting on this person's feedback, and think about what are the actions you can take to ensure that perception of your work is improved (not just here but in future roles).

This is not how a serious professional would provide feedback to a junior level engineer fresh out of college. If your boss is tearing you down instead of building you up, I'd go look for something new. You need mentors and people that want to see you grow.

As a director if I had the same thoughts, I'd approach it much differently.

  - What do you think were the major blockers?
  - What do you think we can we do differently to speed up next time?
  - Have you had an opportunity to see , looks like some really cool ideas and examples
  - What were the good parts of this project in your opinion?

He had an opportunity to build a rapport with you and decided instead to instill fear and doubt. I have never called myself the boss, I'm on your team, my goals are just a little different, but most of them hinge on the fact that you'll be successful, and that it's my job to ensure that success.

Plenty of people are hiring, you shouldn't have to feel like this for weeks on end because he lacks intelligence and empathy.

A few thoughts:

Get the project goals in writing. With good relations, an informal assignment and commitment on both sides is sufficient, if met. That does not appear to apply to you.

If you met the (nebulous) goals, your upper manager might be trying to talk you out of a bonus, or other accolades. This time, let it pass (and say so), but remember how the game is played.

You were criticized for not mining the work of other teams. Place your plans of collaboration before your management, and ask for guidance.

I could say more, and far more options are available to experienced developers within your organization, but the point is that you don't (yet) have these connections, and a grapevine is something you don't have. Your management wants you to have a technical grapevine to mine, but not a running history of their management style assets and disadvantages. Cultivate both.

Be ready to step into another job. Even though you met your goals, they don't seem particularly loyal.

Save your admiration until you are certain that it is deserved. You haven't seen all sides.

Above all, take time to set all this aside, and enjoy your life.

> How should I proceed?

My suggestion is that you didn't know what you didn't know. Your Boss's boss should not have ambushed you like that either. Consider talking with your boss to have them expressly describe what their expectations are and how they are measuring them. Then, using the same way they are measuring, measure yourself and check with your boss to see if it matches up. It will help you understand what is expected and it will help them see how you hear what they are asking.

Also, have your boss put their expectations and their measurement criteria in an email to you, also email them with what you think the measurement should be and get them to confirm, in email that you are correct. With that information in hand, you cannot be ambushed like you were because you have "the receipts" as they say. What's more, if they fire your boss, and the next boss doesn't know what to put in your review, go over your email with them and that will set them straight.

You should switch managers. In this job market, no reason to keep working with them if they aren't working for you.

The problem is that your manager was not there; you were interacting with the wrong level!

The issues with the project that you were chewed out for were actually issues between the boss and your manager.

I'm guessing that planning of this task went on between your boss and your manager. Your manager made some promises about delivery that were unrealistic. Possibly, there had been an earlier (totally unrealistic) deadline for the project that you don't even know about that your manager initially promised, and that the boss still has engraved in his mind as something that should have been stuck to.

Your manager possibly bailed out of this meeting on purpose, using the fire fighting as an excuse, to expose you to the proverbial shit she has to deal with at the management level.

> I have no clue what happened in that meeting and I haven't heard anything about it from either of them since.

But you can probably guess. The boss likely reiterated all the same stuff, and your manager realized that you heard all of it, and that it was unfair, since some of the problems were her fault: everything from the code suggestions that you followed, to unrealistic promises that didn't even have anything to do with you.

Maybe your manager didn't do anything on purpose, but as a general rule, never discount that. It happens that managers will take credit for everything that goes right, and use the people under them as scapegoats to blame when things don't go right. Plus do other things like make adjustments to information they think you don't know. They might promise to the higher boss that something get done by end of December, but tell you that the deadline is end of November. That sort of thing.

For that reason, it would behoove you to establish rapport with your manager's manager. Do not allow your manager to be an entirely opaque proxy between you and the rest of the organization, and your only source of information.

Sounds like your shields are down: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/

Fundamentally, do you trust your manager? You admire them, but do you trust them?

If so, I'd have this conversation with them (outlining what you've said in your q) and say "I really like working here with you and [boss]. I want to succeed here. What can I do differently next time to make sure that I hit a home run?".

This should give you some tasks to do (check ins regularly, design review, looking at other projects). Do them. Make it clear that you are doing them (overcommunicate). If at all possible, loop in the boss (ccing via email works great, as does public slack channel).

On the other hand... If you don't trust your manager, start looking for another job.

Highest order bit:

This sounds like you have an inexperienced manager. You should be given baby projects, with clear (generous) deadlines when you’re this junior.

Second order:

The most common failure mode I see in new employees (some of them quite senior!) is, given a 12 part project, thinking it makes sense to spend 1/4 of the allotted time on part one. This is almost never the right thing to do.

You have to spend much less than 1/12 of the effort on each individual piece, even if this means you’re hacking it together, THEN fill in the gaps, or you are setting yourself up for disaster.

A really good manager would’ve given you a 2-3 part project, as your first “real” project, so that you could learn this lesson without much harm done.

If, in fact, you got a project that needed only a few things done, and you committed way too much time to the first part, then this is just a lesson you’re learning about shipping real projects!

1. Communicate continuously with your manager/other stakeholders any time there is a setback. It’s possible your boss’ boss got pissed that they found out about a delay in your project very late.

2. Big difference in working a job and doing schoolwork is that it’s a lot harder to finish “assignments”. Don’t procrastinate right up until the deadline because you WILL miss the deadline. While missing deadlines is no big deal generally, it looks a lot better if you were working continuously on the project and communicated issues/the need to revise estimates as early as possible.

2.5 Don’t do pseudo-productive stuff like fucking with vim macros or playing with a new rust package unless you actually need to do it for your job. Obviously doing this a bit is OK, but time box it, don’t spend weeks on it. I only bring this up because you mention having fun working with new stuff at work.

3 Don’t tolerate assholes. But also be honest with yourself. Nobody here has all the details to know if your managers are being reasonable or not.

4. Don’t over engineer. Do the bare minimum to get what you need to get done (so long as it’s reliable and maintainable). Use libraries. This is a big learning curve for new engineers, since writing professional software is more about getting some functionality to work than your academic assignments which were about teaching you new stuff. This is what your feedback is getting at: see how other people did something and copy it.

Another thing is that I notice you got your project done within 2 weeks of getting this negative feedback. What was the total timeline of the project? I ask because it kind of sounds like your manager “cracked the whip” / “lit a fire under your ass” and you got the project done pretty quickly after that, since two weeks is almost nothing in the software world (as I know it). In this case your manager may have done the right thing in getting you to focus on landing the project (at the expense of your happiness) assuming you weren’t working way overtime to get it done.

> I don't know if I have a future at this company if the boss thinks I'm not a good dev

I have no idea what the tone was when these critiques were given, but is it possible that this was not a case of "You're a bad dev, look at these problems" as much as "You're a young dev, let me help show you some mistakes so we can do better in the future and make you a good dev."?

Critique is part of learning. And it can bum you out. But it sounds like you already know some of it is valid, and you have rebuttals for other stuff you can hash out. To me, this sounds like a terrific opportunity to improve communication and start making this a productive mentoring relationship.

I could be totally off base - but I'd just consider the possibilities before you assume negative intent.

1) Take the constructive criticism and use it. That's the most important, most objectively actionable, part of this whole thing.

2) Your management structure is broken. You can fix it or leave, but you should definitely do one of the two. If you want to fix it, it seems like you should be talking to your manager. She is either not giving you feedback that you should be getting, or you should completely ignore the boss, but which of those two is the case needs to be cleared up. If it is the former, you're probably being managed by someone that isn't comfortable being a manager yet, and you can help her by asking for feedback while being super transparent about the work you're doing. If it's the latter, then just ignore away.

From my experience, any time a project isn’t on time, something like this happens from someone up high. And guess what? They are rarely “on time”. The solution is adjusting the definition of “on time”, whether it is cutting the scope of the project, better estimation, or conveying the scope and velocity during the project. Usually this falls on senior/leads/management, but it is a good skill to learn as a junior.

Don’t sweat it. The real world sometimes recognizes your effort, and sometimes beats you down and gaslights. You know the effort you put in, and that’s what matters. Get experience, and if it continues, hop somewhere else after a year or two. Get a nice pay bump. Win-win.

Punching down by skip levels should never, ever happen. If you are actually underperforming, that's something to be discussed between you and your manager. The skip level may have legitimate concerns, but by going around your manager they are undermining her, and creating a pretty toxic situation for both of you.

First priority should be for you to sit down with your manager and discuss the feedback you received from your skip level - it's entirely possible your manager isn't aware of the specifics, and also possible that the skip level has it out for them, rather than you, and is taking it out on you.

Unfortunately once you have more experience you will probably agree with your boss: the project should have been finished sooner. This however is not just your fault. The "blame" needs to be shared with your direct manager who should have been keeping more in touch with you and pushing for more immediate results. In terms of the way you were criticized your boss should have approached this with a "you are still learning" attitude in the way they spoke.

Your manager might be more used to working with people who need little guidance. Having worked with juniors who excel out of the gate and those who think they are doing ok but are moving slowly, your situation sounds like the latter. The only way to overcome this is through getting more experience and being much, much more communicative.

Case in point: you say you haven't heard anything from your manager? This manager might lack the proper communication skills, but that doesn't mean that you also have to lack those skills. As scary as it might be, you need to kindly ask them what they think. Talk about what could have gone better. Establish a rapport. Once you have more experience, you might want to look for another job. That is, if you have a successful project under your belt at this company and you still don't feel appreciated the company might not be for you. Be warned: generally speaking companies are not very good at making one feel appreciated in my experience.

All the criticisms you mention concern the responsibility of others and do not reflect on the work you have put in (expected scope change, deadline changes) so it sounds like there is a communication issue between your manager and the boss. It was therefore ‘unfortunate’ they werent at the meeting. I don’t see how you could have produced anything more based on your account. Perhaps you’re able to reflect similarly.

Besides remind yourself you are all working towards the same goal and put your best into the job, projects are never ideal, that’s ok

Strikes me that the person not doing good work here is your boss and, probably, your manager.

What did the meeting you have actually accomplish? How will it help you or the rest of the team improve?

If the project or the timeline are so important, how does any of this help you get there? If I have a real deadline that I need somebody to hit, I'm going to explain the context of the deadline to them—how else are they going to make good decisions to actually hit the deadline?—and I'm going to continue talking with them throughout the whole process so that both of us understand how the project is progressing compared to expectations. If something is slowing the work down, what should we do about that? If there really is some mismatch in skills, what can we do to help you improve, and how should we adjust the rest of our plans?

Feedback like this should never come as a surprise. I don't like absolute rules in any complex scenario, but this is about as close to an absolute rule for leading a team as I can imagine. Even if the overall assessment of your work is "fair"—how likely is that?—the fact that it came out of nowhere for you and that you are not sure what will happen next is straight-up bad leadership.

It sounds like you're feeling guilty about the feedback, or that it means you are not an effective programmer. The one upside about this situation is that there are specific reasons to believe it really is them, not you. The downside is that there probably isn't much you can realistically do to change the situation—after all, if your leaders aren't effective, how much do you expect working "harder" to change anything? The main thing that I've found helpful in these situations is to remember that your "performance" is very context-specific, and the context here sucks. I've often found it hard to feel this viscerally, but even just thinking this rationally and recognizing my feelings for what they are has helped.

Recognizing this also helped me get in the right state of mind to decide what to do next. I've had situations like this a couple of times; the first time I ended up switching companies and the second time I switched teams within the same company—both times, it made a larger difference than I expected.

Early career devs need to accumulate a few things, roughly in this order of importance: - projects where you made a key contribution, where you "owned" something - senior people who will be mentors / boosters - a portfolio of skills, technologies, domain areas, engineering practices, soft skills - maybe a fancy name? A FAANG or a startup that hits big.

It sounds like you're getting a couple of these. Jobs that hit all these points at once don't grow on trees. But, always have your feelers out. Keep in touch with former colleagues and schoolmates.

Don't assume that senior people know what they're doing. They've probably been promoted to a role in which they're just trying to figure it out. It sounds like your manager and her boss are struggling. Have empathy, but don't get stuck paying for their mistakes. Managing up is a skill. I wish I had it.

Expect requirements to change. They usually do. You can't beat direct contact with end-users and rapid iteration based on their feedback. Serving real users is fun and even the most clueless and back-stabbing of bosses will respect it.

- Don't assume management cares about your best interest. Some will. Most won't. - Don't think you can change a dysfunctional org from below. You can't. - Don't beat yourself up. Look for lessons and keep on keepin' on. - Don't stay in a bad situation. Everybody's hiring.

> 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.)

This is very hard to do and feels very unfair, but try to own this rather than say "but this is what I was told to do." If the person is a manager she isn't writing code day to day; she is likely experienced and can offer helpful suggestions, but she can be wrong or vague, or you may simply not be familiar with the way she uses certain terms. Try to discuss these suggestions with technical leaders or the more senior engineers on the team, they will likely have more context.

Make sure you're actively listening to what people are really saying in meetings. Volunteer to take notes if it helps and then review them with the participants at the end to make sure you got their key points.

When I worked at Amazon, I was really impressed by how seriously folks took the "Leadership Principles." Two particularly struck out: "disagree and commit" and "have a backbone." Obviously the two conflict with each other at first view, but on a second look the theme is the same: know when and how to listen to others and accept their suggestions, but also know when and how to convince others to accept yours.

Dont worry too much we've all been there. If you want it easy, work at a junior farm first (badly funded startup), that will both lower expectations from the top (you re cheap, nobody is experienced), and create contrast if you work a little bit better than the rest.

I joined a new industry with new methods and Im one of the youngest dev at 30+, and I can tell you all those years working with result first and insane deadlines because no money, makes me more comfortable: even if I dont know something they all do, Im the one pushing for doing it faster anyway and I know the tricks to use productively things you understand halfway while you learn the other half. And when I screw up something they never would have, it's management defending me "but at least he got it done in 2 weeks eventually when you quote us 6 months all the time", which is unfair to the perfectionist OGs (shortcuts were taken) but such is life.

Also accept, as we all do, that it's the job of some people never to be happy and to try the pressure angle on devs of projects slowing down just in case it does something to move faster. And try to stay on the cheap salary side for 2 years while you become useful, that tends to compensate for your lack of xp and their impression of juniors. In my company, the training material for managers to deal with "millenials" is that "they are impatient, they care more about their impact and the praise their receive than the company bottom line" so while that's exaggerated probably, it's also good to reflect on why you care so much about the kudos. Make the money, claim the money.

This sounds like an internal political game between your boss and the skip level and has really nothing to do with your performance.

The non-asshole way of your skip-level to ensure a critical project gets delivered in time is to discuss the deadlines and priorities with your boss and KEEP HANDS OFF THE TECHNICAL DETAILS! Then your boss should break it down to milestones, answer your technical questions, and keep politely bugging you if they believe you are going to miss the deadline.

If the skip-level is not happy with the progress, they should express it to your boss, and the boss should get back with some compromises (hiring more people, simplifying requirements). The golden rule of management is that all praise should be public, and all criticism should be private and candid.

Setting up a meeting with 2 bosses and 1 employee where the skip-level is blowing steam at the employee, forcing the employee to point fingers to the boss is a sign of GROSS managerial incompetence. Skip-level looking through technical decisions (rather than user-impacting perf metrics) is another sign of GROSS incompetence. Having 2 managers and 1 junior programmer work on a feature is yet another red flag.

The key takeaway is that your skip-level is either an incompetent asshole blowing steam off, or trying to get rid of your boss, using this as an excuse. You can find out by checking their previous history (how long they worked together, who hired whom, how big is the company, whos idea was the project) and asking some questions (suggest adding some features to the project to both bosses in separate conversations, and ask about their overall project opinion in between).

If the skip-level is trying to kick out your boss, they may keep you nonetheless, or may try to kick you both off the boat. Your boss may also want to scapegoat you to keep their job (and it may work if the company is shitty). If the skip-level is just an emotional asshole, your boss should give you some hints about not taking it too seriously, so then it's up to you on how much shit you want to put up with.

Either way, most software companies these days are an absurd theater fueled by gossip and human emotion, while the actual product is secondary. You need to either account for it and be cynical, or just ignore that part and be ready to sometimes get fired or blamed without any reasonable explanation.

Talk to your co-workers about it. It's impossible for us to give you any good piece of advice. Your boss may be a prick. He may have been screamed at by someone higher or some client. And maybe he was just having a bad day...

All in all, it's not good for a boss to tell their employees that they're fucking up. unless he comes with a plan to fix it and it's actually better than what you guys were doing... So technically, he's the one who's messing up...

For me it sounds like she is trying to pull the blame on you instead of taking the blame herself. "It is not my fault", this is how bad organizations do stuff. It is all about not avoiding blame, so in such an organization always do front end stuff which is visible since the management in such orgs do not understand the stuff underneath. What is not visible do not exits. I know this is hard to comprehend and understand, but you can not change it.

Dogs have a boss. Start using the right names for things - at least in your own head - and you will work it out, I'm sure. And besides, he might act like a boss, but this is probably not a good leader. There's a difference.

What helped me in these kinds of situations, is having a very clear picture in one's head of the relationship. It's work, there's a horizontal agreement made upfront. This dude is not your father, not your king, not your slaveholder.

There’s a ton of good advice but I’d like to add my two cents.

Your boss also has a boss that (s)he is also trying to make happy to keep his job.

Regarding design decisions, timelines and everything else, look at that from the business’ perspective. Are they about to miss a launch (and $$) because of a dateline pushed back?

Are they getting heat from customers (and risk of loosing $$) because some feature is faulty? (read, bad code, slow, buggy, etc)

At the end of the day the bottom line is money, so when you are able to optimize for that, you are usually held in high regard (good use of business money).

This can be a little counterintuitive for us engineers, specially if we haven’t been that long in the industry, because we are trained for beautiful code, elegant solutions, etc. instead of a company that is trying to meet next quarter’s goals.

I’ve received raised based on “hacks” that felt not dignified enough to be worth my time (read, junior with big ego wanting to solve hard problems), but that little toy app saved multiple members of the team about 2 hours daily!

Hope this makes sense, and don’t take criticism too personal, it can really affect you.

Try instead to put yourself in the shoes of your boss/manager and figure out what’s important for (s)he, what numbers is (s)he monitoring, who might be screaming (hopefully figuratively) at (s)he and optimize for that!

Good luck!

Ouch, that's a really rough spot to be in. It's really harsh of your boss to tell you that they expected you to get this project done earlier when you are so new to the company, it doesn't feel like very valid feedback and I would try not to take it personally and just assume that they were having a bad day and unfortunately they took it out on you. Regardless, giving that type of criticism is not a good pattern for your boss. It's just not effective.

The idea of proving your worth at a company is definitely something that has been repeatedly proven to me as being invaluable. I would try opening a dialogue with your immediate boss and having a bit of a check-in. I think that as this project comes to a close now is a good time to do that. I would let them know about how uncertain you felt with that bit of criticism, and maybe asking for concrete suggestions to address the problem with your upper level boss. Maybe some way that you can submit extra weekly reports detailing more of the work that you are doing on specific projects, including changes to requirements and how they affect your workflow. Sometimes bosses get so caught up in the big picture they don't recognize the ways that unexpected changes impact their teams.

I’d say just walk away when you still can.

It’s VERY hard to change the perspective of a boss that thinks you aren’t doing your job. I recently had a horrible manager who ignored me for months when I told him the dev environment was so unstable it was impossible to get anything done.

I kept asking for him to look into fixing it, again ignored. This continues for a good while until his boss takes a look. Boss boss is upset we don’t have a stable dev environment, which makes what I do get done take 5x as long. I blame myself for not clearly documenting these issues in emails. I’m really not a confrontational person, and I can’t know if it would of went better had I sent a bunch of angry emails saying without a stable dev environment nothing will get done.

Then it happens, I’m thrown under the bus and I have to leave anyway. I will say this was done in a very nice way. I’m given time to find another , far more enjoyable job.

Going forward I’ll walk out sooner if my boss doesn’t take my concerns seriously . I don’t argue with people, not at work, not in real life. As if this wasn’t enough I received a few late paychecks since my manager would neglect to approve my timesheets on time !

Drop that admiration, assuming you’ve finished a full year you can leave right now and it looks fine on a resume.

Good luck !

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

That's a pretty unfair judgment to pass on your work based on a decision that was almost certainly made at a level far above you.

I don't know if this is mentioned explicitly, but your company sounds small. Here's something I didn't learn until a decade into my career: good managers are expensive. The corollary to this fact is that good management is frequently too expensive for small companies to afford. That means your managers will likely be, at best, inexperienced, or at worst, actively harmful (for example: they don't really want to be managers).

I suspect that your manager is blocking and tackling some of the boss's bullshit. Giving your manager the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that's the case, it sounds like she made the mistake of putting you in a position to receive some unconsidered feedback from the boss without positing herself as a moderating factor.

I don't have great guidance for you here - just context. If the tech challenges are enough to keep you happy, then stay. If it's weighing on your mind, and an honest conversation with your manager (if you trust her that much) doesn't fix it, then leave. (The job market is red hot right now. You'll be A-OK.)

I will say that this situation does remind me how tired I've become of working small cos with lousy management. I've just spent enough of my life dealing with it.

You mentioned that you got to work with Rust. Is the critical boss an opponent of using the language for projects? The issue could be political and have nothing to do with you. Another thing worth noting is that this can be a manipulation tactic of lighting a fire under your ass to get more out of you (churn and burn). Again, it has everything to do with you working even harder than you have going forward. Finally, this discussion with you can be your performance review that is held against you when cuts come. They may already be coming and they already decided who should go, and this discussion was necessary for legal reasons.

Your code, if it works and has been tested, is already better than what could have been written in many other languages. You will learn software design and architecture with experience. It will come in time. Keep investing effort to learn how others design and your work will improve.

You should proceed by working your ass off and keep doing what your doing. Computer vision and Rust? Get it all while you can. Whatever hard work you put in will pay itself forward. Either you'll quit on your own or be cut and have done everything you can to prepare for your next job. It's a win/win situation for you.

Keep going.

This feels toxic. Immediately start looking for another job in the related field. Don't wait. Have something lined up. When smells start... they don't go away. Time to be proactive instead of reactive. If this keeps happening, it is you. If not, it's them but you shouldn't wait to find out. If it is you, don't worry, you can always improve. If it is them, well, you are better off. From what it sounds like, its them.

I think first thing to be sure is that you're not misinterpreting the intent here. Sometimes random comments that aren't really delivered with bad intent can easily get misinterpreted. Perhaps the manager's boss intention was to help you in some way. It's expected that a really junior person will make bad decisions (maybe not what you're looking to hear here). That's (partly) how we learn. How well do you know this person? (Wasn't clear to me from the above who is "he" and "she", you said your manager and her boss and then you referred to that boss as "he").

If this is not a question of misjudged intent, and probably after trying to clear it up with your immediate manager (but be subtle/diplomatic about it), I would consider my future with that company.

The other thing to note is that us tech managers are notoriously bad at people skills. It's possible both your manager and your manager's boss think you're doing great work most of the time, and say nothing, and just say something when they feel it needs improvement. So on the whole they think highly of you despite your perception that they are critical. Again, a more open talk with your manager, while being a little careful, should help clarify this. This is a good conversation to have after you've accomplished a major goal (like "pretty much done"). Just ask for feedback in a neutral way, don't accuse anyone of anything... If you get great feedback, it's a good time to ask for a raise or a bonus if you feel you deserve that! If you're not having these conversations it's really hard to gauge what people are really thinking...

Good luck!

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.

I'm not expert on your situation and commend you for posting here. Not sure how useful any of this will be (or any of any of the comments will be) because basically nobody knows you or your team and everyone brings their own perspective and experience--and you'll have to figure this all out on your own--I mean, it is your career, right? This may sound an obvious caveat but I think it's important--because there's always gonna be people eager to give you advice, simply as a way to validate their own experience--even when it doesn't apply to you. But I'm sure you know that already.

I'll just try to offer some general meta comments that got prompted for me while reading your post.

- Your manager may feel she doesn't know how to have a difficult conversation with you (for whatever reason) and may have deliberately slyly ducked out of the meeting under the pretext of fighting a fire to let her boss do the heavy lifting of that conversation. Lest this despair you, it's not a bad reflection on you that your manager may find it hard to be critical--it's just about her, but if that's the case, you could always help her out by giving her lots of opportunities to share where she's up to with your performance.

- Maybe you are seen as a rising star and are being 'groomed' eventually for some sort of leadership (hey, sometimes in tech companies things move fast). So the boss is giving you some pressure and criticism to see how you're going to handle it. It's not the content in that case that's important, it's the fact of its existence, and what you do about it. Maybe you're seen as someone who could report higher, so you're being given a meeting that mocks that up.

-

This is really incredible. You are on one end of the spectrum by being hardworking and motivated, while I on the other end of the spectrum by being lazy and unmotivated. While both being misjudged.

I started last year, and since then I was constantly late to work, left home early, and always complained about design, tasks and so on. Took ages to understand code written by others and just thought it's over-engineered when it's clearly just my lack of skill. Moreover, the deadline and planned launch is delayed too; I firmly believe this is my fault. Yet, my boss thinks I worked really hard, and the delay is not related to me. I told him this is not the case but he says just work hard this year while giving me a good performance review.

I'm completely blown and with the shame and guilt I'm feeling, the way I proceed is to work hard and actually contribute to the project. If I was in your case, I would tell them the truth of which you did work hard with so much care. I'm afraid if you don't do this immediately it would end up as a trauma and will stay in your head for a long time.

You need to balance letting your manager know that this is a bad way to manage with the likelihood that your manager will forget about this. Managers should let you know early if things aren't going well so you have time to course correct. They also shouldn't leave new juniors alone to make important architectural decisions. On the other hand, to the extent that this "counts against you" if you don't say anything about it your manager will likely forget it happened in a relatively short time.

I would create a list of your manager and his peers. Record how long, approximately, they've been in their current role then average those times.

If the number is short, like six months, then I would let this go on the premise that, in six months or so you'll probably have a new manager and it's just not worth arguing about.

If the average tenure is much longer then I'd wait a week and implement as much of the feedback as possible. Then I'd schedule a meeting with the manager to go over what I'd done in response to the feedback and raise the concern about late feedback.

Doesn't sound like a great place for you to grow and succeed. I am sure you're a smart engineer and you're doing good work, but a junior dev straight out of college should absolutely not be the solo dev on an important project.

The structure of the dev team seems all wrong. Who created the tickets for this project? Who did QA? Who was supposed to be reviewing your code as you went? Who is writing the documentation? How often do you and your manager meet to discuss the project and your role/growth at the company?

From your message it sounds like you were left alone to do a waterfall style project from beginning to end with little to no supervision or direction. If that is even partially true, you should consider polishing your resume and looking for a different job.

You can give your direct manager feedback about how you were set up to fail, but it doesn't sound as if this engineering department has even the basic structures in place to help you grow and succeed. A junior dev fresh out of college really should not ever be left alone on a project.

I think you have to learn, pointing out that some design decisions are from your manager is a worthless point, I also have a coworker who doesn't have an opinion and changes idea on each contrasting message on a PR discussion, but you need to have yours and your knowledge and ability to reply, they hired you to contribute not to do what you are told, otherwise go be a policeman.

In the end someone told you to do something, and you didn't have the knowledge to disprove and YOU did that, not your manager

On the other hand they hired someone fresh of university who still need to create meaningful knowledge, so maybe they could've defined better the figure they needed beforehand

On the other hand, I think you should be happy and motivated to learn and improve for yourself, in few years probably you won't even remember your boss and managers names, and on the other hand I don't see any personal criticism in here, given the fact those are criticism and I see myself making too, and of course seeing an improvement or will to learn would definitely be seen as a good thing

First don't ever say this is what my manager told me to do to his/her boss, accept critics and say that you will improve. Then talk to your manager and explain the situation, you don't know their relationship and if the critics are towards you or really are a way to criticize your manager. Besides that work at your best and speak a lot to your manager for feedback

Sounds like there’s some blame game going on. Project is late and they’re looking for scapegoat. That’s a red flag that the management is poor. You can do as great work as possible, make sure you take notes what was assigned to you and what you delivered, even better: overdelivered, and think how you’d present your results. Just don’t join the blame game, you cannot win.

While maybe your boss could've used some more empathy, there are many good learnings here that I struggle myself with:

- communicate your progress more often. The status of the project should never be a surprise, especially when things are not going perfectly well. Write it down, send slack updates, be proactive in communication.

- being proactive includes asking for feedback and for help when needed.

- avoid doing with the goal of being praised. You know when you're doing well, you know when you're learning. That's all that matters really. Especially in your first job. Your goal should be self-reliance.

- avoid attaching your sense of self worth to the code you write. You'll write great and shit code. That doesn't reflect on who you are. You'll be horrified at the code you wrote 2 years ago, but you will also be proud of how far you got.

- you are good enough

Take it easy my friend. If the goal of mountain climbing was to get to the top then people would summit the Everest on a helicopter. Enjoy every step of the ascent instead. Slow down and enjoy the view sometimes.

And fuck your boss.

My work is only tangential to the software engineering industry. Therefore, my view may not be as applicable as others.

I think it’s inappropriate for this senior manager to have given any feedback about the status or requirements of this project directly to you. As a recent graduate, I would hardly consider you to be responsible for any project management duties. It’s up to the project manager to set expectations and make decisions regarding things like meeting a deadline. In this case, I would assume the project manager is your direct manager.

There is a direct correlation between the output of a project and its inputs: the deadline, any specific requirements, and resources provided to the individual contributors assigned to the project (e.g. a senior resource providing code review). The project manager’s duty is to be the “neck to wring” when there are issues with the project. That is why they are responsible for communicating and setting expectations.

Perhaps your manager did not handle these duties well in this instance. In fact, it sounds to me like this is the case based on your story. Because your manager was not present in this meeting, the senior manager apparently chose to wring YOUR neck instead, which is inappropriate, especially given your tenure.

This is going to happen to you a lot in your career. You can protect yourself or prevent it by keeping good records of your actions. For example, your commit messages could contain a copy of whatever specifications you received, or you can make a habit of confirming your assumptions via email with the appropriate contacts in copy.

Either way, don’t take this too hard. You are unfortunately bearing the brunt of unprofessional behavior that is happening well above your head. The fact that you completed the project and feel proud of the output is what you should remember from this experience.

> project should have been finished a long time ago and he can't believe it's taken this long

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.

You may not like my advice, but it’s the truth.

1. you’re doing well enough. If it is a pattern your boss will mention it, if not it was just feedback. Maybe your boss was having a bad day, maybe you need to work harder, maybe you had some mistakes

2. Grow a thicker skin. Every single meeting with my boss I ask for harsh feedback. Every meeting with my teammates I tell them to lay it on me. Honesty, is what helps us grow.

3. No need to be mean, but if someone in my team is missing expectations I tell them so. I suggest ways to improve, say “hey; you really let me down here”. And we try to figure out how to improve. That’s how business works. Take the feedback and move on.

4. If you can’t move on, self reflect. Maybe you’re too sensitive. If you feel your manager was unprofessional, mention it. If you feel it’s just your feelings hurt, then recognize it as feedback and when you feel you improve, ask your manager if they saw said improvement. Make it a two way conversation.

5. People get impressions — you don’t change them by complaining. You change them by performing well.

It's impossible to tell from a write up like this.

You could have taken a little project and turned it into something big, not leveraging knowledge and resources, and maybe misinterpreting requirements of it being 'quick and dirty'.

Or - you could have a manager who lacking in perspective, which is entirely common.

To boot: you could be both right, or both wrong as well.

Boss could be needlessly nitpicking, at the same time as he's right about the time required. Maybe he's just in a bad mood, or under pressure, or miscommunication the requirements himself.

It's also very typical of devs to nitpick their own projects and fuss around features they don't really need, corner cases etc. and forget the 'big picture' and take too long.

It's a really, really hard thing to fathom.

I suggest talking to your manager, letting them know that you thought you were doing well enough, that it's a surprise to you, and maybe dig in a bit on the 'actual requirements', make sure that 'timeline' is part of that. Also take a moment to make sure that you're leveraging the right tools and team knowledge, and that you're on board with the internal coding standards, and make sure to ask about communicating - its' important to you that you're doing a good job, so if something is 'off' you want to know right away from your boss. Oddly, if there are weekly updates or something along those lines ... none of this should be a surprise.

Finally: Don's Sweat It.

It's going to be ambiguous like this for the rest of your career, whatever you do. Try your best to put it into context, roll with it, keep your chin up, move on. If you're even asking questions like this, you're probably going to be ok.

One of the best things about my job is that the CEO and other product owners genuinely understand and accept that when they change requirements and blow out X weeks/months of work the project will take that much longer. Not having that at the upper levels of management is going to make everyones lives painful. It's not a quit immediately issue, but certainly an explore your alternatives issue. It's also sometimes a symptom of financial stress. Life is _much_ better working at a company that is significantly and reliably profitable. Deadlines at the C level are bankruptcy and/or negative cash flow. Even decent executives have trouble not trickling that pressure down on the entire dev team. But as a dev without a signifiant equity package, the solution to that is just find a better company. Also, as a junior you pretty much shouldn't be making _any_ architecture decisions. Suggesting them, sure, but actually making them, no.

"Code monkey think maybe manager wanna write Goddamn login page himself..."

You are right to feel bummed out. However much you may like your manager's boss, I don't feel he addressed his concerns in a constructive manner. Not only was berating you about your past mistakes a tone that is not conducive to future progress, but he failed to take your youth and relative inexperience into account. If there's a way of working he wants you to do and you're not doing it without prompting... that's understandable because you are fresh out of college. When you get to be my age, it's a whole lot less understandable.

Maybe you should talk with your manager about it. Sit down and say, look. I like working here, and I want to do better, and I think there are ways we can improve the quality of feedback we're getting. And just, hash it out, maybe put together a list, and then go to your boss with it.

I dunno, maybe it's not that kind of place, though. Read the room.

Sounds like a bad mentor. You may need to cut your losses. It's possible your interpretation of your progress is not accurate compared to expectations, but that does not mean anyone should interact with you the way you are suggesting your dude did. Software development is hard and a good boss will understand that and help you grow, not belittle you.

My first boss used to mark up my work with red pen (it was a lot of printed output). He was correct to criticize the work, but really sucked how he went about it. Like, it was intentionally a bit demeaning. I left after a couple years, even though I was doing quite well.

After reflection some years later, I would say I was overly reacted / was overly emotional over it. But it's hard to feel that way at the time.

Alternately, after several more jobs and life experience, I have made the most money by jumping companies and not sitting still. I have also learned some bosses are just dicks / incompetent. That boss was niether, but some definitely are.

So, I don't know where you and your bosses fall. If you genuinely think they would fire you (have they fired others?), then it would be prudent to interview other places. If it just 'feels bad man's, try and take the hazing with some pride that you survived. Over time, they may just respect that you are tough.

Good luck!

I'm confused about this scenario. Reading between the lines, it sounds like you were put solo on a project with very little guidance, just as you walked in the door on your first job. No team, no mentor, no buddy, no code reviews, no daily stand up, no issue tracking (which is a way of measuring progress). This sounds like a place that has not upgraded its software development practices in years, if they even know what they're doing at all.

The first feedback you get is from boss's boss, who directly criticized architecture, coding decisions, and timeline? No. This is not on you.

Here are lots of replies telling you to be a better communicator, which is always good, general advice, but this is not a good situation, and will not teach you how to be a better software engineer. "Do better" is just terrible feedback.

I know that you like this job, but know that there are better places out there, and that better places would never strand you like that.

How should you proceed? Grow some thick skin.

Modern education has failed you (and you were probably coddled a bit too much). Hard work is small part of a much larger equation which includes context, bigger picture, results etc.

Everything you mentioned is completely normal except for you whining about it on HN, as a junior dev mistakes are inevitable. You accept responsibility and push back on the "unfair" criticisms.

Maybe your pushbacks were discarded, maybe they didn't "understand" your side. Welcome to the real world, you work on what you can control and if thats not good enough maybe this is not the right place for you.

This idea that you are entitled to an "understanding" is silly. This is not college, you're not paying them. In fact as a junior dev, they are investing in you. This mistakes you will be making and the resources (senior devs) it will take to bring you up to speed is a net cost for them for the next few months.

In this case, my strategy would be to turn criticism into a potential improvement, and focus on the improvement.

Take every criticism seriously, frame the problem, and seek a solution. For example, he says your decision to consider an offhand comment from your manager as a hard requirement was a bad decision. First, was it? Let's say it was indeed a mistake. Now, how to avoid repeating the same mistake, because clearly, there is a communication problem. You can then try to make suggestions, maybe formalize requirements a bit more.

And if you have no idea, don't hesitate to ask "How can I do it better?", after all, you are the junior, you have a lot to learn, they have experience, take it. If your boss is as smart as you think he is, only good will come out of it. If he has no idea but he continues criticizing you, maybe he is not that smart after all.

But if the suggested solution is for you to work harder, run away.

This may not be the case where you are, but it illustrates the things that you can't see that could color interactions.

I was hired into a highly prestigious team. My manager always seemed gruff; I worried that he regretted hiring me.

About eight months in, he had back surgery for a slipped disc. Suddenly, he was fun, joking, smiles. I realized that all the time before, he had been in pain.

Later, a friend in HR broke the rules and showed me the notes from my interviews. My manager had said something like, "He didn't understand how X works, but after I explained it to him, he understood how to solve the problem." And this exact quote: "We should try to hire him for my team." I felt such pride.

When I later had a medical crisis, he turned out to be very empathetic. "Take care of you. We'll be here when you get back," or something along those lines. This was the guy I thought hated me.

Don't sweat it too much, but it sounds to me like this organization has communication problems, and it's not really realistic to expect a fresh face to industry to identify them consistently and act proactively. I personally think your skip-level was having a bad day (in which case they may feel bad about how they said what they did) or an abrasive personality (in which case they may not). In the latter case, they may or may not hold a grudge. Ideally, it's the "not." Some people are brusque but really do not overweight it in ongoing evaluation.

Now that you know the communication problems are there, regardless of the accuracy of fault finding, you may have an inkling on how to compensate for it now.

If they start dogging you with bad projects or bad work conditions, I'd start looking for the door. If not, write it off, hold no grudges, and focus on learning.

I think what probably happened here is this ... your bosses boss, has had misgivings about the project and your work on it, that he's been passing on to your boss. I think your boss either disagrees, or agrees but has been trying to softly nudge you in the right direction without alarming you.

My feeling is that it's probably the latter, which is why you haven't heard anything since the meeting between two of them after you left. You're new in the industry so this isn't something that you should even be able to pick up, but what I'd suggest is a bit more tactful probing around these ideas to find out if one of those guesses is correct.

If you, or worse you AND your boss are on the higher ups shitlist, you want to take corrective action as quickly as possible even if your boss doesn't (which might involve lining up another gig, just in case).

As an anecdote, in a toxic environment, I had a boss who was shielding me in similar fashion from his boss who was supportive of some other coworkers I was repeatedly butting heads with. My boss agreed with me and thought my approach and work was the right way to do things, but I had no inkling till one day he casually mentioned that his boss had weighed in on what up to that point just seemed like low level squabbling. That got me very alarmed indeed, and he was shitcanned not even 4 weeks later. Turns out that they had pressed him repeatedly to fire me, and used he refusal to do so as one of the reasons to get rid of him.

In came a new boss, and within weeks (conveniently after I'd wrapped up a very difficult project, which was part of the reason my now-former boss had been shielding me from them) I was told I had no future at the company (directly from the higher up). So, keep your ears and eyes peeled and proceed to do some digging.

Your boss might not be giving you the full scoop on what's going on behind the scenes, and you might need that information to take evasive action. Hopefully I'm wrong though.

Hate to say it but start looking for another job. I've been in the same situation and learned that its almost impossible to change a boss's perception of you once it becomes negative. Maybe there are some things you could have done to be more transparent and those are great learnings to take to your next gig.

It seems like you are already analyzing the mistakes you made and will adjust in the future accordingly, so you’re already many steps ahead of many of the less successful engineers I’ve worked with. Many of them will just blame everyone and everything else for poor outcomes rather than accepting responsibility and trying to improve in the future.

My main advice: always under-promise and over-deliver. Managers don’t see code typically, they usually are more focused on deadlines. Be very pessimistic when discussing deadlines. Take your initial estimate and double it to account for potential problems. Be very clear about risks beforehand. And lastly, no one cares if you wrote some chunk of code or if someone under you did, all they care about is knowing who lead the team that delivered it on time. Be that person and you will be successful at almost any company.

This feedback does not sound particularly constructive.

If they wanted something done faster or better: Well isn't that special? Look at the special boy who wants work to magically go faster with 0 additional work coming from higher ups or senior engineers. That's really nice, but that isn't how things work in the real world. Stuff takes as long as it takes.

If you aren't having regular, as in daily, meetings with your team to make sure you are working on the right things: That is literally your manager's only job. Do not let them brush you off.

Meetings are for YOU to make sure YOU are doing the correct work. It isn't you turning in your homework, it isn't an accountability check-in where you get a letter grade and a lecture. It is the time you communicate about progress and goals. They are YOUR meetings, to help YOU, NOT theirs!

Helping you with these meetings and other forms of communications IS YOUR MANAGERS JOB.

And if your team isn't considering changing requirements when planning work, then that isn't on you either. Requirements changes should go through your project manager and it should affect project scope.

However, at a certain point, you have to manage UP to get what you need from your team. Set a cadence of accountability with your manager and team. If they don't make that reasonable accommodation, at least you can say you tried.

===

As an aside:

Here is a fact you probably have not had to deal with too much yet: Some people are cruel assholes, and they don't even know why. They just say and do cruel things because that is who they are. Don't deal with assholes.

The other thing about assholes: They manipulate you. They make YOU feel bad for THEM. They make YOU feel like YOU are doing a bad job instead of taking on the responsibility themselves.

If I had a Jr engineer who was struggling, I would tell them and I would help them. If I had a Jr engineer who I forgot to manage and then they failed to meet expectations... well, i wouldn't behave like your boss. But shifting that blame downwards is a tactic you could use.

We have too much mobility in this industry to deal with assholes. If you are writing and shipping computer vision projects, cash the checks, keep your head down, get the experience you need, and once you are done with this place: Leave without looking back. You don't owe them anything.

Your manager’s manager shouldn’t be directly criticizing you. This is so wrong on many levels. That manager should relay feedback to your manager directly and your manager discusses performance in a 1:1. That’s the ethical way to do it. This feels like a power play and you should get an exit strategy worked ASAP.

A manager cannot ever blame a product delay on individual developers in a team. That's the whole damn point of being a manager and getting the top brass, large office and colored parachute: you must take responsibility for the end result, the buck stops at you.

If a critical path activity is not completed and delays the product, it may be that an individual developer failed in his task, but it your fault as a manager for the product delay: you should have dedicated more time or more experienced talent to that component, you should have tracked it closely and corrected the problem, you should have communicated to upper management the objective reasons outside your control and team for a delay, etc.

Otherwise, what does a manager exactly do? Sits around at his desk waiting for task to be completed on time like some sort of plantation owner?

World is not fair. People expect it to be. That expectation seriously harms them in nearly all instances.

Listen to criticism, extract from it anything that you think might guide you to any sort of improvement. Ignore the rest of it as if in was never uttered. Don't dwell on where it came from and never think about whether it was just or unjust. It doesn't matter.

Don't develop any emotional relationship with your bosses and your place of work. You are there only to earn money and learn things. If those two things happen everything is as good as it needs to be. Disassociate yourself from any drama even if it is about you. Value of your work is increase in your bank account balance and new things you can put in your CV. Your work has no value beyond that.

Work is not a place to make respectful friends. Especially among your superiors.

Welcome to corporate America, where you are a disposable cog in a machine of managers trying to build their own empires and save their own asses. You either learn to play the game or you get crushed. If this is a name band company where the stock and benefits are worth it, then stick it out and find your way to move to another team. If this is a no-name company, then think really hard about what your future career looks like there and whether it's worth it relative to other opportunities. Are you going to get fired? No probably not - they probably aren't giving you two thoughts and it was as much about a manager posturing or venting as anything. But, that tells you something about the quality of management above you and you have to decide whether it is worth harnessing your career to them.

>>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.

>>He looks at the code and criticizes design decisions, some of which were made largely on my manager's explicit suggestions.

>>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.

Very bad manager, in fact novice would be an understatement for these kind of practices, based on everything I've learned from these statements. Feed backs are a continuous, never ending process, given in a positive direction. Any surprise or a shock down the lane, implies the manager has utterly failed at their job.

Don't beat yourself up. You have done nothing wrong, and this is not the end of the road.

A few things to consider before making any decision: 1. How long have you been at this job? 2. How long was this project estimated to take? How long has it taken? 3. Were you part of the estimation process? 4. How hands on was your manager when it came to the execution of this project? 5. How comfortable/safe do you feel having difficult conversations with your manager? 6. How large is the company and how much mobility do you have within it? (Could you switch to a different team if you wanted to?) 7. How many months of runway would you have if you didn't have this job anymore?

Pending answers to the first set of questions, I see two possible scenarios here:

Scenario I: Your manager was in the loop about this meeting.

If she knew that her boss was going to have this conversation with you, she should have been in the room with you. If she had a fire to put out, she should have rescheduled this meeting so that she could be there. She should have, in fact, had a conversation with you about her boss's displeasure (and perhaps her own displeasure) before you walked into this meeting.

Scenario II: Your manager had no idea what this meeting was about.

This would mean that perhaps the project/product you are working on is at risk of getting deprioritized, and both you and your manager are about to get shuffled around to work on something else.

If you are very early in your career, I would recommend valuing mentorship above anything else (even compensation). In both scenario I and scenario II, it does not seem that you are receiving an adequate level of mentorship within this organization. If you are comfortable putting your job at risk, this is something you should definitely bring up very directly with your manager and maybe even with her boss or her boss's boss.

If you need a job right now, just keep your head down and start looking for positions either within this company or somewhere else, where you can get mentorship from excellent engineers who are also excellent mentors.

I'm looking at this from a PM's perspective and not a devs perspective so take it as you will.

>he basically tells me this project should have been finished a long time ago and he can't believe it's taken this long >>Sounds like a manager with a MBA and lack of hands on technical experience.

>he says I probably just misinterpreted an offhand comment of hers as a hard requirement >>The problem isn't you not understanding her requirements, its a lack of documented well defined requirements - and any changes to said requirements should be noted and tracked.

>no longer necessary due to changing requirements >>Once again, this sounds like your manager is deflecting the fact that they didn't have well thought out and well defined requirements before the project began.

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.

There are a couple assumptions you're making here. For instance the firing (from your perspective likely but will they really?). Take a step back and take stock of the situation.

Communicate with your manager. Your manager not being there in that meeting definitely didn't do you any favors. Make sure the both of your are on the same page. They should have been there to deflect. Be proactive about communicating and making sure everyone is in alignment. Easier said than done especially if the company is smaller or the manager is busy. But a 20 minute time investment per week will be worth it.

Figure out why this happened. Figure out what can be fixed and move on. But be vigilant because that kind of behavior is frankly uncalled for. On the other hand getting a new job in this market should not be too hard.

Generally, it's not reasonable to have your first round of feedback on your first project at your first job straight out of college come from your skip-level manager. Frankly, that strikes me as fucking insane.

This post isn't enough for anybody to judge your work or your qualities as an employee, but taken at face value it raises major red flags for me. I would ask your direct manager, directly, how she feels you are measuring up to her expectations so far, and what her expectations are going forward wrt. the issues she and your skip-level manager raised.

Don't let them gaslight you. Without experience, you are an easy target to take advantage of. Advocate for yourself, believe in yourself, and if you truly think your employer is being unreasonable then walk away and find something better.

First you need to understand what is actually happening here and who is responsible.

Deadlines are creative fiction. It's nice to hit them, but they are almost always management tools to extract work from engineers. Only sometimes are they intimately connected to actual business needs. Don't get me wrong, they can be a helpful tool, but equally they can be harmful.

Scoping and requirement changes are program management issues. It's useful to push back on obviously bad requirements and scoping. But this requires understanding of the business space and what likely is good and what isn't for the end user. Sometimes you can save program management blunders with the right questions and friction to the desired feature set. But this is more the in the realm of experienced devs correcting management issues (an invaluable skill). Customers certainly can change their minds, and it's often appropriate when figuring what the real needs are. But it does cost additional schedule and money to pivot. Sometimes significant amounts of both when fundamental assumptions are changed. This should be understood by management or they are not doing their jobs.

You experienced some common management issues. Your boss was expressing his frustration to you and that may or may not reflect on you down the line. A lot of people don't own up to or recognize failings.

Engineering issues also can happen, but that typically involves failure to build the thing to spec. Also can involve over engineering or under engineering given the communicated business needs. This happens plenty too.

Unless you're just lazy and not working, that's when delivery time is your fault.

Good management of engineering projects is pretty rare. In twenty years I have only experienced it a couple of times.

As for what you can do, ask your direct manager questions like "I really liked working on this project, how can I be successful here?". This helps align your interests with his and communicate your willingness to pitch in/contribute.

> I really did work hard

First of all, this doesn’t really matter too much. You mentioned it a couple of times, so I wanted to respond to that point. If you can slack off and still get your work done, that is better than working hard but not achieving your goals.

That being said, I think it is unfair to criticize an inexperienced dev too much over things like design decisions or not knowing to look at how other projects have done something.

If anything, the rest of your team deserves blame for not providing adequate guidance and assistance along the way.

Do you not use some kind of agile process? This would bring problems to light much more quickly and give you many opportunities to communicate the status of your progress along the way, so hopefully you can avoid the “this project should have been done a long time ago” meeting.

I'm sorry you had this experience. It sucks. A lot of managers suck, because the skills and traits needed to get a promotion or run a business don't necessarily align with the skills/traits needed to be a good manager.

First, this is not your fault. Do not take this personally. Your manager/boss is the "adult" in the room - what happens between you is their responsibility, because that's their job. If you are walking away from an interaction feeling demotivated, annoyed, etc, then that's them being bad at their job, not you being a bad employee.

Second, this is not how professional, constructive, feedback is given. If your boss wants you to make some changes in how you work, they will be specific about that. This kind of unfocused complaining contains no actionable instructions, so you can safely ignore it. It's good that you've found some specific things that you were able to take away from the meeting, but given the context, those may not have been intended and you may not find yourself being praised for following them.

Third, your boss is only human. Humans have bad moods, bad days, and some humans make themselves feel better by making other humans feel worse. Every human is just trying to feel safe and loved, and your boss is no different. Be aware that they are this type of human, and try to remember that if it happens again.

Fourth, take some meeting notes while it's still fresh. For this first time, I wouldn't send them to anyone, but if this recurs then start obviously taking notes during the meeting and emailing them to your manager and your boss after the meeting. It's amazing how having written records of meetings stops unprofessional behaviour during them. It will also clarify if the criticism is genuine, or just your boss offloading their problems onto you. If anyone objects to you taking notes during the meeting, then they are definitely just offloading and you can ignore everything they say.

There's probably more, but I think the main point to realise is that this is not your fault. Try not to let it get to you.

My advice is, do you work profitably not "right." Business cares about profit, so don't burn money (your salary) on stuff that won't make more money than is being spent. Not that you should ditch quality because quality affects profit but you have to find the way to make money for the company. I hope it works out for you because it sounds like you're good at your job and don't phone it in. That sometimes gets punished when it's not done profitably. For what it's worth, you are likely really hard to replace because the supply is so limited but if you like the job and want to stay then this is "fixable" (quotes because it's not really broken but you're not gonna win that argument with your boss).

> I'm working my first job out of college and I really enjoy it.

As a (former) tech manager I'd stop right there. I take it as my duty to provide guidance, by means of code reviews and frequent discussions about code and architecture, naturally if the developer wishes so - usually something i ask for during the interview process for early career candidates. Furthermore I encourage the team to help in a friendly meaningful manner. Although it is the duty of the employee to try and brush up their skills (as their current job will not be the last, and training on the job for a specific job doesn't do magic for one's career) it is also our duty (those with a bit more experience) to pass on the torch. Of course there is nuance to everything.

Tell your manager about the conversation with your boss. Keep working hard. Communicate with colleagues, and always ask questions when you have them- or even when you think you might have a question.

Your manager's manager has authority over you, but remember: that job is probably 100% non-technical. Highly technical advice (e.g. anything relating to how you write/structure your code) should be taken with a grain of salt. When it comes to code feedback, listen to other engineers, listen to your manager, and listen to whoever is reviewing your PRs. Those people actually have to use your code, so you should write your code in whatever way they prefer.

If you really feel like they might try to get rid of you, get a signed letter of recommendation from your manager now.

Think on the feedback received in a constructuve manner for what it might contain of value but do not let it undermine your confidence. Use it to get better.

Many of us will receive undeserved negative feedback at some point in our career. Receiving at the start of it, it is just harder to take it but use it to grow. This is one more thing to learn.

I must say that your managers seems pretty rubbish for many things: conducting this meeting wihtout your manager in the room, unloading his fustrations on you and apparent lack of steering.

Whether to leave or not: do not fight it as they are part and judge so you will not win. But have an open conversation what this means. Do not overreact but do not ignore it neither. And be cool, your present job have great things on it but there are many others.

I've seen this happen a lot. 9 times out of 10, it's actually not about your specific job performance, but actually about setting expectations (which it turns out, IS part of your job)

Your boss doesn't know all the details, but they see the end result (a delay), so they jump in and critique everything in sight.

What they probably need is to be looped in throughout the project and made aware of major decisions that change the end result or whatever it is that they care about (timeline / impact of the work).

Here's a template I use for managing expectations upwards: https://www.notion.so/Manage-your-manager-26a26b82bd824f97bf...

You are not getting thrown under the bus, so all is good! The project is done, you've learnt something, kept your job.

It's a good time to exhale... and recharge, shake off some doubts and guilt. Everyone feels that bad when wacked like a mole by big boss and when orphaned by the direct manager. So, I'd rather see it as it's not about you, it's about them... Your ego got a bruise, but it'll heal.

The next steps depend on your company/team culture. If there's some formal retro process, then there will be a chance to look over what worked and what did not. Patch over it collectively.

If your team has no such practice and just zips into the next project/stage, then you may want to find ways to gain such feedback by yourself.

In general, if you perceive a blame from your boss, then the team is somewhat dysfunctional, esp. knowing that you are a "green mind". So this may by itself present a finding for you.

Meanwhile, just chart three columns and fill what and why you think worked well , what did not work, and how to possibly make it work (if by yourself or by the team). Keep this analysis to yourself, primarily just to offload it from your mind.

Also this may prep it for possible talk-it-over chance with a boss (there usually will be a review at some point). Though I won't keep hopes high, I would just learn things as I could.

That early in your career, just find a sane way to gain the experience, mostly good one. Try not to color everything personally, it's just a project, there will be others. Learn what makes you feel good at your job, what sort of interaction, dynamic. This will help you guide your future decisions and career choices.

Good luck!

P.S. there are some political ways of handling this, basically "managing your manager" but I won't try to go there, as it's exhausting and only spreads the dysfunction.

Congrats on surviving the project. Get all this shit off your mind and make it ready for the next run, now you're battle-tested!

I was in this kind of situation once, and it was basically a setup for subsequent termination.

My advice is that you should have a 1 on 1 with your manager ASAP, and ask them to be upfront with you about things.

In the end, if someone says you failed to deliver on time, or you failed to follow instructions, or you failed to write code as it should be written, you can't do a thing about it. If you've been tagged as a "failure", arguing your point or trying to say they are wrong will go nowhere if they already have made up their mind.

If your manager is "managing up", then you are not in a good place as you will become a scapegoat for problems. If your manager really has your back and will defend you, you are in a better place.

It could just be some careless words by other manager and nothing comes of it.

It's very hard to know. Personally I'd write up my thoughts on the project, list the changing requirements and etc, but not share them at this point if you don't feel comfortable doing so.

I will say that I find the idea of any kind of astonishment or frustration about a project given to "new guy + first year out of college" guy is absolutely absurd.

Any "new guy + first year out of college" should have someone assigned to them and monitoring / helping and there should be NO surprises / blame assigned to "new guy + first year out of college" (outside of some very unlikely bonkers level lies or poor performance).

Just stay open to appropriate criticism, reflect and discuss criticism you cannot accept (maybe it is really inappropriate, but maybe not), talk a lot about expectations theirs and yours, maybe make some suggestions to * on the job training, * mentoring, * code reviews

Be also open about your respect for your managers and their skill, but do not belittle yourself. Keep the story of the lion and the mouse in the back of your head :-)

Also see to it to get feedback on criticism from a different perspective, i.e. talk about the talk with the boss with your manager. They might help you separate the rambling about project mishaps from the stuff really concerning you.

And finally: Always remember there are other good bosses out there.

It sounds like your manager had particular expectations and failed to communicate those to you. I think you've done well to recognise that you felt like you were treated unfairly, but also to recognise valid feedback and things you could improve upon.

I think it's a good idea to make it clear that you simply didn't know about those particular requirements, and that you would benefit from clear communication. I doubt that they're unhappy that they've hired you - you've done good work, and they can only expect so much from a junior. I'd keep at it - there's a good chance these are just some minor issues that will be ironed out as you continue to work together.

Is criticism from being late due to changing requirements normal / valid ? I can't wrap my head around that. You're not paid to predict the future.. you do what you're told to do every day, if it ends up useless what can you do.

Anyone who picks on subordinates is an asshole. If you need opponents, you should look for them in your own weight class.

Keep an eye open for another job. Keep in mind that you could always quit and do something meaningful together with people who deserve your help. Have that mindset when the toxic boss approaches you next time.

Ask for a meeting with the manager soon. Check if the manager has a backbone and is supportive to you.

You should not be managed by two persons at the same time. You should only report to one superior — which is your manager. Ask your manager to shield you from the boss.

If your manager is not able to shield you from the toxic boss — find a better place to work.

Your mental health is much more important than this job.

When this sort of stuff happens, you should have a paper trail that you can point to call out this kind of BS. This is why story grooming, sprint planning, and documentation are your friends and not some useless chore—they keep people accountable.

Congratulations, you now have a personal experience that is required to increase your future effectiveness. It will continue to inform you on a visceral level when you are heading down a meaningless road.

It sounds like you spent your time and attention on an aspect that is not of value to the customer (user) that is paying the salaries of yourself and your managers.

There are various reasons for this, but keep in mind that you only have control over your own familiarity with the customer's needs and what you then prioritize. If you rely on the guidance and understanding of your manager and boss, you will only get resentful whenever they make a mistake and treat you unfairly.

It's time to move on.

Your version of what happened shows several signs that are red flags:

Shifting requirements, without realistic expectations.

Unclear expectations.

Lack of proper oversight for Jr developers.

But, more importantly, you are in a position that you have a lot of baggage to overcome with your leadership and that's a really hard place to be, especially if you are looking for advancement. It's much easier to find another job and start fresh, from the position of someone that a company is excited to have onboard.

I have no idea whether or not you deserves the criticism, but the mental anguish you're feeling isn't going to go away without you continuing to feel pain, for a long time.

It's not worth it. Best of luck!

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.

There could be any number of reasons why you were the outlet of his frustration that day. It could be entirely you that was the catalyst, or not, it could be something that has nothing to do with you.

People have bad days and it’s entirely possible your boss may also be making a mental note not to come down on you like that again.

If either of you don’t given each other a chance from that moment to possibly walk back from the edge and let cooler heads prevail, then this simple bad moment cannot be forgiven and will act as a butterfly effect for an inevitability.

Brush it off and lay low, unless push comes to shove.

Signed Yours truly,

I’ve worked in corporate forever, and know the ups and downs.

These are classic mismanagement patterns. It's their responsibility not to leave feedback until it matures into surprise on your side or resentment on both sides. Eventually, it becomes your problem though. So, ask for feedback frequently. “You should try harder.” is not a good feedback. What are you supposed to do exactly? Ask for actionable feedback. Ask them to exemplify what you could have done differently in a certain situation, for instance.

More importantly, always be looking for a job. Your moves are restricted by your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement). More alternatives mean more leverage.

One possibility seems to be: your manager and the boss had some issues recently. The boss is unhappy with your manager, something has been brewing between them. Your project may or may not be directly related to this tension. The boss wanted to put some pressure on your manager, but your manager dodged the meeting. This may have added to the bosses frustration and he kinda vented on you in the heat of the moment.

It’s possible that there is objectively nothing wrong with your performance, but situation like this can still happen.

Your bosses behavior may be the way they operate to influence others or it may be a one time loss of nerves.

I would advise not to make a big deal about it. Someone who looked at the project from far away made bad comments on it. This is actually very common. When things start working and sell, all this is forgotten quite quickly and life goes on.

Your boss feels like he has to act as a customer to his engineers. I am not sure this is the best way to manage engineers. Anyway take this for granted and act as a supplier towards him: defend your work, the team, blame unclear and changing requirements, hide your work from scrutiny and claim you will improve processes and communication, remain positive but vague on details.

1) we have your side of the story. It may be completely accurate. But try to step outside yourself an imagine you were looking at an employee doing what you're doing. Would the impression of productivity be the same?

2) Have a frank, blunt conversation with your direct manager about precisely what was said by the boss and determine if they agree with the boss's impression. If their impression is the same, you really need a deeper conversation about the specific criticisms. Make sure your explanations do not sound like excuses: preferably it would include a fairly accurate accounting of time spent on each aspect of the project and why it was necessary at the time. Ask for feedback on how you might have done something different.

3) If your direct manager is on your side, do what you can to encourage them to explain things to your boss. That may be difficult because there could be aspects of it that would make your boss look bad-- things that were your fault, not theirs. That could even be why the manager bailed on the meeting. That happened to me once, with the CEO no less. The VP that was supposed to be in the meeting with me was a no-show, and the issue was their responsibility not mine. If the manager didn't deliberately leave you out to dry, they may still be able to mitigate the damage a bit.

4) it's possible the boss just doesn't like you. Personality clash, something else, I don't know. I've seen that: a relative of mine had to fight to keep their job when their manager loved them but the boss higher up had an unreasonable dislike of them and thought they didn't work very hard. Luckily it was a good manager who fought for the relative.

5) if none of the above help and things continue on this path, prepare your resume and actively seek another job before they have a chance to fire you. Especially in tech, it's a shoppers market for people shopping for a new job. If you live near a tech hub or really any metropolitan area then it shouldn't be hard to find another job. You might not like it as much as your current job, but if not then you can bide your time there, learn what you can, do some good work to add to your resume, and then find a more satisfying position somewhere else.

Good luck!

Whatever you do, DO NOT QUIT. The lessons that you just learned are going to help you and most likely will guide you in the future. After a while you will meet other people like these two, who are most likely responding to pressure from above, and since both of them seem to micromanagers (my assumption) they would find something to fuck about with you regardless. You know what you have done, and there is no possible way to respond or meet deadlines when there is a hidden agenda. Just do what they ask to the best of your ability and the rest will take care of itself. Good luck and Godspeed.

Not a ton of details in your post but I will attempt to decipher what appears to be the problem from a tech dev manager perspective

1. Project time - were expectations communicated up front? What estimation methods are you using? Agile scrum for cadences/daily reporting? Your post reads that you did heads down work for awhile. That is a recipe for disaster for a junior dev. Daily checkins (or at least 3x a week) is the norm for my organization.

2. Requirements - see frequent check ins above - as well as what mushufasa comments as well. A HUGE part of great modern development in enterprise is constantly iterating requirements and getting feedback. This is something I specifically sit down with new college hires. This is not college anymore with a well bounded problem - you have unlimited problem space and you need to define boundaries constantly. One of my favorite quotes is: "the difference between a good developer and a great developer is that a great developer knows when NOT to code"

3. Design decisions - does your group have a design review / peer review process? A junior dev should always have a senior dev review code prior to check in. Your check in's should be frequent (daily is common but there is debate on exact frequency). It should not be weeks particularly for a junior dev.

4. Perhaps your most egregious error is your comment that you should have checked other projects. I assume youre working for a large-ish company. It is imperative you do not re-invent the wheel for every assignment. Particularly for the "glue" or standard pattern parts (which usually amounts to 80% of the work). This is something your manager ideally makes explicit early on (perhaps this was the meeting). I have had lots of frustrating convos where the developer took weeks to solve something that was a known pattern or solution if they just went to the firm's stack overflow or checked another similar projects github.

5. Managers are people too they have off days and can be frustrated with a million other pressures going around. I have definitely had days like that and likely took it out unfairly on a junior dev. More-so if this is your managers boss who likely doesnt deal with junior dev's day-to-day. His/Her expectations are different.

Your boss has a problem of some kind and is trying to scapegoat you. Write up notes in as much detail as you can recall and store a copy somewhere with a date stamp - if you're not comfortable putting it on the internet, send yourself a letter by registered mail and don't open it when it arrived.

Then keep it on file and return to work. Change tack as explicitly instructed by otherwise just keep doing your job. Your contemporaneous records of the conversation are insurance that you can mention if/when you find yourself having an uncomfortable conversation in a HR office.

It's hard as a new grad to know how to always be on the same page as your manager, much less your skip-level. But, you've now learned the lesson. While fresh it would be a good time to be a bit humble and even a little contrite. Admit that everyone was not on the same page, and proactively ask for weekly 1:1 with your manager and biweekly/monthly with your skip-level. They are there to help grow you in your young career.

Also, maybe go on an interview or two. Can't hurt to have the confidence that other offers are possible if this goes further south.

Stop thinking about it. Keep working hard. Maybe push back harder against design decisions that you disagree with.

Always remember that almost any negative comments might be due to the perpetrator simply having a bad day.

First thing: communicate. Whatever you wrote down here, sit down and go over it with your boss. Also ask him what's worrying him. Obviously what's keeping him up at night (maybe even literally) isn't matching what you're doing.

Second, some small tips that will probably help any junior:

- It's not college anymore. We don't do assignments. You don't work for your boss, you work with your boss. You both have the some goal, albeit some difference in roles and responsibilities. Therefore treat your boss like a co-student and not the professor. That means: get frequent feedback, make sure there is a common understand of the goal that is in sight and the steps you (both) have taken to reach that goal. Essentially treat your boss like a peer, but with a different role. In a healthy organization this is appreciated.

- The next thing that is different from college is that in the working life no one cares how you got where you are. You are not getting graded. That means cut to the case. Basically there's a three step approach you need to take every day that will help you get to seniority pretty quickly if you master it: 1. Explain the current situation ("so we want to build this feature for customer X because blabla ..."). 2. Explain the problem in the current situation ("... but our platform isn't ready for it yet and we want it to ship it next month ...") 3. Then the magic part: give your boss options and avoid open-ended questions. Don't ask him what to do, but rather present him with a few options on how we can proceed, and ask for his input (" ... I think we can solve this in the following 3 ways: . I think we should go for A given XYZ, what do you think?")

- The third thing you need to remember is that need to be visible. Transparency is key. That means sharing your current('s team) status, even if nothing's changed. Never go underground for longer than 2 days without anyone knowing what you're doing. You might think you're doing something amazing but it's a huge red flag you're wandering off in the wrong direction if no one's what amazing stuff you're working in and why it's important. You can easily achieve this by scheduling a short recurring meeting (maybe there is one already, then use it).

I'm getting a suspicion of an "umbrella manager" here, like the boss is a storm and your manager has done a good job keeping you out of it. Either that or he threw you under the bus, but that feels less likely.

I would try and talk with your manager about this. See how he feels about the boss and their method of delivering feedback. If my suspicion is correct, he's getting it even worse than you.

Either way, I'd recommend you start hunting for your next gig. If your manager is dealing with the same type of degrading feedback, bring him too :)

Start sending out resumes, sounds like a dysfunctional management structure, probably wont get better and you'll be happier somewhere else.

If a lateral transfer seems possible, tell HR you would like be transferred out of your manager's boss's org structure.

Go above manager's boss's head and file a complaint against them for incompetence and unreasonable expectations: blaming workers for delays caused by poor project management is counterproductive and unacceptable CYA behavior. (Ideally once you already have a better offer in hand)

One thing I’ve learned running various teams including many very talented new college associates is this.

Young new college graduates are not any good at work until they either learn how to be or are coached how to be. It appears to be a tautology. Honestly, it’s totally ok, what’s not ok is for them to have expectations of young new college grads to be experienced hires instead of associate level employees. This is poor leadership not representative of your failings (which I expect are plenty given youth and first job).

With a person just out of college, I would say if they have this many complaints then they totally lack management skills.

If you do not get an apology, then I would leave as they will just damage you more.

What the manager boss did was wholly uncalled for. I recommend sending the link to this discussion to his boss.

Your manager and boss may be very technically smart, but like many people who are technical, they need a lot more education in management. I have been, in the past, as bad as your manager and their boss. But I have learned to be better.

Your manager's boss shouldn't have given you criticism without your manager being there. You and your manager are the most informed about your work and it should have been a discussion among the three of you.

I think you're going to get more of the same. If not directly from your manager's boss, it will be passed down to you. And again you will be puzzled. It won't quite add up and will feel like you and your bosses are on a different page.

I would make sure to stay at least a year, then find something else.

I think this is a pretty normal experience for a new dev. I had a similar thing happen to me after one of my first projects, a guy who I didn’t even realize was my technically my boss pulled into a meeting room and asked me why I took so long. It bummed me out a lot because I thought I had done a good job and in a reasonable time. I got over it though, and apparently they did too; I ended up working there for another 2.5 years before changing jobs because I wanted to move back to my home city.

first of all, congrats on finding a great job with smart colleagues and fun problems.

you need to be able to put this aside for the moment. as in, not the the useful advice, but agonising over 'fair'.

I've had negative feedback that I thought was exaggerated. How I dealt with it was to take on the feedback nonetheless, because I wanted to satisfy to myself that the criticism while valid was not a useful perspective on my work.

I've also had negative feedback that I was convinced was totally misplaced. How I dealt with it was to sympathise with my manager's position: they were obviously having difficulties with their own responsibilities.

I've also once had negative feedback that I had to admit was totally valid. How I dealt with it was to realise that my colleagues wanted me to perform at a higher level. I took their advice on what changes to make in my work, and went on to enjoy many more years in that role.

The first few years of my career were punctuated with consistent positive feedback, and I think I was the worse for it. Any mistakes I made were treated as aberrations, and for a few years I never got any advice about how to be better. Instead I got totally unhelpful declarations of brilliance that did nothing to help me grow.

quite likely your boss and your manager are more at fault in this scenario, but if so, you need to let them be wrong this time. As others here have suggested, I'd encourage you to pursue regular progress reviews with your immediate report.

I'd spend some time browsing through the ticket system and understand how colleagues handle tickets (duration, discussion section, difficulty of ticket). Also I'd check the code with a linter. So you can confidently say how you compare. Next time someone complains you can prove the opposite. Also I recommend sticking to process, commenting tickets as needed, marking them as blocked timely and generally making sure you're aligned with the PO/PM during each sprint.

You should not worry and learn from the lessons. Really, nothing happened that doesn't happen to all of us. Such situations and their handling would not be different in other industries. With experience they will happen less.

Anyway, when your bosses stress you it means their boss stresses them and so on. It's part of the job, and you should decide whether such an environment is good for you, because in good companies the more junior you are, the more protected you are from such pressures.

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.

He is a bad boss. He is trying some weird power game. How do you proceed?

- You can challenge him back with logical facts - You can agree with him and include him in the process make it as team failure - You could treat his opinions as not important - You could quit and look for a more emotional supporting place - You could ignore it and let it eat you up - You could ignore it and realize some form of this non-sense exists everywhere and learning how to deal with it is your next step

Reading between the lines, it sounds like you're spending a disproportionate amount of effort on low-importance tasks. Don't forget that you're an employee for a business. The business sells solutions to customers and your job is to create those solutions (at least, assuming the company hasn't become huge and bloated).

Whether or not you're working diligently isn't really of huge importance if you're working on the wrong things.

Sounds like you don't have a good manager, if this wasn't being communicated to you and she had her boss deliver this feedback to you alone. You should talk with your manager about it and if you don't feel the relationship improves soon, my advice is to switch teams (at the same company) or companies entirely. If you have a bad relationship with your manager, it's going to be unfun to work there, and life's too short.

I would consider looking for a new job on the side and start interviewing. Your boss's boss showed you disrespect and personally I would have a hard time trusting that person if I were in your shoes. Don't start any drama at work on anything... just keep working doing what is expected but don't go above and beyond killing yourself, and start practicing for interviews and start applying at other places if you can.

I don't think you should quit, but oddly enough, this other HN post about quitting seems really appropriate. Check out the first flow chart here: https://jmsbrdy.com/blog/leaving-spring/ Mirroring what some others have said, if it was me, I'd talk to the manager and work things out from there.

> I'm working my first job out of college

I could have stopped reading there. My first job hop after college brought a 150% pay increase. Don't leave too soon, but you probably don't want to stay at your first company for too long either. Especially if it's a source of stress and unfair treatment.

It's not so much about the company as it is about getting a second perspective, and probably a pay increase, early in your career.

Get a new job.

I had a similar thing with my first job, (though it wasn't fun), just an undocumented, unintuitive system, plus pretty introverted team, so not very good at helping. I was unproductive. When I did ask for help it was terse explanations so they could get back to their own work.

Changed jobs to a more extroverted group and got on a lot better.

At the time I had thought it was all my own fault, but looking back on it, it was very poor management.

You are describing an organizational dysfunction. If you got to the point where the boss says how he can't believe it is taking you so long, which is news for you; and suggests that you look at other projects when you are already nearing the finish line, then something is seriously broken with the communication within your org; and it should be your boss's, or your manager's, job to fix that.

In general, and for your own sanity, I'd say be honest with your boss and manager - say you got were bummed by the feedback, that you want to improve and ask what they suggest for next time.

If you still keep getting unwarranted. wrongly timed criticism, I'd say quit. The problem isn't you, and I'd imagine it would be too difficult to establish a good, long term relationship.

Surprise skiplevel feedback is pretty strange. Tells me that the boss is inexperienced, maybe poorly managing stress. Micromanaging the engineering decisions of their own team just reinforces that.

If you have a good relationship with your manager tell them what happened, how it makes you feel, and let them deal with it to make things right.

If there was even the hint of this happening again I'd find a new job.

I only have one side of the story, so I'll take it at face value. It sounds like both your boss and your manager suck at their jobs, and this is not a good place to be long term.

I'm going to assume that as your first job out of college, you don't have a lot of leadership experience.

> 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.

This isn't your problem, and your boss is a dunce. It's your managers job to ensure project deadlines and status are communicated, as well as any delays. It's your boss's job to KNOW why one of their projects has been delayed this long. There exists a myriad of effective processes for SDLC to manage project software schedules.

> He looks at the code and criticizes design decisions, some of which were made largely on my manager's explicit suggestions.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, that your boss wasn't merely having you defend your decisions--having to justify decisions is part of being an engineer. Reaching beyond your manager to provide comments on your code is not helpful (as evident in that it took the wind out from your sails). Good software teams will utilize code reviews to provide that feedback. And if your boss had comments about the code, he should have talked to your manager about it.

> I have no clue what happened in that meeting and I haven't heard anything about it from either of them since.

I have to wonder why your manager hasn't bothered to share with you what the outcome was. However, if it's something you're curious about, definitely ask.

> I really did work hard, so it's demotivating that it feels like the result of me working hard is unappreciated.

It's not that. There are a lot of bad bosses out there, and this is the effect they have on really talented workers.

> How should I proceed?

Work just hard enough not to get fired, and find a side hustle 2nd job. Or have an honest conversation with your manager about how that meeting felt. If it were me, and one of my talented team-members felt like they got s*t on by the skip, I'd want to know, and I would work to repair that relationship (personally my relationship with my skip-levels is one of the most powerful tools I have as a leader).

In your very long forthcoming career you will find very few moments of clarity. Take it from a veteran of this industry - take it easy , have fun , keep the focus on being productive and objective. You cannot control much more than that and there are always many forces at work which you might not even have an idea about. So relax and don’t take it too personally. Good luck!

There’s some real mistakes on the part of your direct manager here. It sounds like they have not been properly managing expectations between you and their boss. Out of curiosity how many direct reports do they have and how long have they been managing?

I would not be surprised to hear you’re reporting to someone who until recently was a just an IC and is still learning how to manage.

Scenario 1) You did produce substandard shit code that could have been done in a week. In that case, figure out what you did wrong and learn from it. Most fresh college grads produce shit code, it's just a thing. No one holds it against you because you're young and new. In this case, recognize the advice from someone better and more experienced than you, and just do better next time. Don't take it personally as an attack on your abilities and character. I'm sure you're a nice person. I'm also sure as a new college grad, you have a lot to learn still. This is one of those times where you can use an experience to learn.

Scenario 2) You did a fine job but your manager is unable to appreciate that. In this case, you still have more to learn but not on the programming side (well, probably still more to learn there, but not relevant to this situation). This is a lesson on how to deal with bad managers. They are not better than you, they do not own all of your time, and you have the right to leave at any time. As a dev, you will probably be able to find employment again easily. Use this to your advantage and any time the pressure from this bad manager rises, remind them of that fact and be ready to call their bluffs. Polish your resume, and get out of there in 18 months (bad managers don't get better). Leverage your position to a better job at higher pay.

How to tell between Scenario 1 and 2? That's hard to say without more specifics, but either way I think the takeaway is to try to learn what you can from this and don't take it too hard.

Don’t take any of it personally. It sounds like you’re doing the best you can. Your manager is probably not great at some aspects of managing re: communication / expectations. You might have to be more proactive about checking in with your manager on a regular basis about these types of things (even though this should be their responsibility — not yours).

> 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.

You need to start applying to other companies immediately. Please take this as a MAJOR warning that they are setting you up to fire you. There are many reasons why they might do this, but you've ALREADY TRAINED YOUR REPLACEMENT. Changes are good that other person is either cheaper or better qualified and they want to free the chair/pay up for them.

I've been in this exact situation and it's better to just hit the job boards as fast and hard as possible. Given 100 years, this manager wouldn't change their opinion of you. You were blindsided and scolded without your direct manager's involvement. If you "stay loyal" you'll either be fired or treated the same way over and over. If you have 6 months of Rust and Computer Vision experience it should be pretty easy to find new work right now. This is the best job market in decades, take advantage!

If you think you're giving your 100% then you need not to think more. Just focus on your work, learn from your mistakes, learn from others mistakes. There are a number of communities related to coding, just join them you'll get a lot of things to learn, even you can raise your questions and get help from peers.

Failures are part of life and its success.

Your boss sucks. Responsibility for a junior RCG’s success/failure in their first year rests mostly on their managers and senior peers. You have to fuck up pretty severely for the blame for any shortfall to shift to your shoulders. Unfortunately this industry is full of clowns we call managers. Yours sounds like an immature noob.

Unless you want to be seriously underpaid into the future and lag in promotions, virtually nobody has a future at their company as a junior developer. You could easily work for 20-40 different companies in your lifetime. Just make sure you are always marketable and what your manager thinks matters a great deal less.

Because this is your first full time professional position, I'm inclined to accept that some of the criticisms are genuine and you have a growth opportunity to learn from them.

BUT

The part that bothers me, as someone who has been in this industry for almost 25 years and leads teams, is that your manager was not in that meeting with you. That I find absolutely unacceptable.

Your manager is not just the person you report to. They are also responsible for your success and they should be your advocate. This type of feedback should be coming from them, not the higher-ups.

The higher-ups should look to your manager to manage, and your manager should look to you to accomplish your duties. The higher-ups should not have enough insight into the day to day minutia of your project to know to point the finger at you. They should get status reports from the project manager and if things aren't going smoothly they will ask why, but a good PM will point the finger at themselves and protect their team. And if there is a problem with an individual team member they will address that one on one in private before escalating.

If that feedback is not addressed then the project manager may escalate to your direct manager/boss who is then responsible to work with you more. Again, one on one in private.

If, after all of that ... things still aren't improving, then it can be escalated to HR and they can take additional action. But unless you are leading a project, you are not accountable for the success of that project as a whole and - I'm going to sound like a broken record here but - any direct feedback pertaining to you individually should come from the project manager or your direct manager.

Under no circumstances should you have been in a meeting with your boss's boss to discuss your performance without your direct boss being present.

The thing that would be troubling me the most, if I were you, is the question: "Why did this happen? Why are you on your boss's boss' radar at all?"

The implication of that question really bothers me. It implies that your manager(s) might have thrown you under the bus to cover their own ass.

Absolutely evaluate the feedback and see if you can grow from it. But I would have a conversation with your boss and basically call them out for not being there to advocate for you. And ask them how such an inappropriate meeting was allowed to transpire in the first place. You deserve answers.

> I had no idea that he felt this way before the meeting

Meaning, your manager did not say anything about her boss being disappointed with how long things were taking?

> I have no clue what happened in that meeting and I haven't heard anything about it from either of them since.

This and the observation above, assuming it's true (that your manager never said anything about her boss being disappointed), makes me think you might be putting more weight than necessary on what happened in the meeting with your boss. At the very least, you might want to double check.

One way to double check would be to ask some coworkers for feedback on your manager's boss and his communication style. Are the kinds of things he said in the meeting with you signs that he's really disappointed and might ask your manager to take some action, or are they just spur of the moment things that don't imply any longer term consequences?

Another way to double check would be to schedule a 1 on 1 with your manager (if you don't already have regularly scheduled 1 on 1s, otherwise just use the next scheduled one) and say that it looks to you like the project is pretty much done but you want to make sure there aren't any loose ends. Then briefly describe what you've completed, and what still needs to be done, and ask if there is anything else that you need to do to finish the project off. During your description, you should mention the key criticisms that your boss had and describe what you learned from them and how you are hoping to apply what you learned to your next project. Your manager's reactions and feedback during all of this should be informative.

> it feels like an inauspicious start

Actually, for a first project in your first job out of college, you should expect to make mistakes. We all do at that stage of our careers. If at the end of the day the project is done and meets requirements (and I'm assuming that's the case here, since you say the deadline was moved and is still in the future and you say it's pretty much done), overall it's a success. The real question here is how your manager and her boss deal with the fact that you, in your first project in your first job out of college, made mistakes but still ended up delivering a successful project. Good managers and bosses recognize that newbies will make mistakes, and will be looking for signs that you learned from those mistakes so you won't make the same ones on your next project.

Wanted to write a lengthly response to this since I think I have some perspectives that might help, but wife doesn’t like it when I spend the night writing when I should be in bed. :-)

Tell you what though: I’d be happy to do a video chat with you. I might learn something. Drop me a line if you’re interested.

This reminded me of reading The Goal.

The main character is trying to run a dysfunctional factory in a dysfunctional company structure.

His boss comes storming in to fix everything. All he does is upset one guy so much he quits and put the entire factory behind trying to prioritize one job because that customer is making noise.

It seems to me that you have bad managers. Blaming the rookie underscores their ineptitude.

Don't worry too much about it. Prepare yourself to not be like them when you're the boss.

Every project has tons of things to iron out. It is best to discuss them openly, hear everyone, and backtrack when necessary.

I found that book quite useful to understand/frame those relations: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kim-Scott/dp/B01KTIEFE...

Former individual contributor, former middle-manager and former "VP-level boss" here. I've seen all this before, several times over.

Know that this will recur throughout your career, most likely. Your boss is disconnected from the project and the manager, and the boss has no idea what's happening at the individual contributor level. It's always "you shoulda done this, you shoulda done that" It's always in retrospect from a boss like this, never, ever in anticipation. Did the manager or boss say: "Hey dazeandconfuse, we've seen this before, you can look at how the Widgetspinner project solved that issue for guidance." No. They're not there for you. They're there to blame you when their failure to support you manifests itself.

I'd bet that the manager and the boss don't have productive 1-1 sessions on any regular basis (or even very good communication) and thus the boss doesn't know the status of things. The boss ultimately is too lazy to care or really be involved, doesn't listen, or the manager sugarcoats things, or lies outright, or a combination of all these things. No one is accountable on a day-to-day basis. The boss never, ever looks at the project plan with any comprehension - even though they're constantly insisting you document stuff that they'll never read. Especially action items from meetings.

In cases like this, the boss will pretty much always over estimate how quickly things can get done, and under estimate how much work and complexity is involved, or what the real bottlenecks are (and in all likelihood that the boss is a big bottleneck themselves. They are overconfident in the resources they have, and probably don't institute positive processes for a happy, productive workplace. The boss will ignorantly sabotage things by withholding information, failure to be involved, fail to communicate, fail to have clear goals, failure to identify outcomes, failure to see the big picture.

We used to have a phrase about changing requirements, the case of "The Executive Drive By". The boss will make a suggestion for an enhancement: When that enhancement changes the schedule and delays a project then "It was only a suggestion, I didn't set a new requirement", or if the project stays on time without the suggestion then it's "Hey you guys screwed up, where are the blinkenlights I asked for, can't you guys get this right? Who is running this project?!?" Win-win for them, lose-lose for you. Just like they want it to be.

I'd take it as a signal of poor communication up-to and down-from the boss, and in all likelihood the boss isn't really interested in ensuring the manager's success. If the boss was unhappy with progress, the manager should've known long ago, before the deadline slipped, and it should've been communicated by the manager down to everyone with new expectations and goals and a plan that eveyone was on board with -- including the boss. That that didn't happen tells you everything you need to know. There are problems. Probably systemic, and unlikely to change.

It's a sign of typical dysfunction and the natural adversarial relationship between manager and boss. Eventually the boss will seek scapegoats down the line when things don't go well, never accepting any blame themselves. Never.

Eventually won't go well enough that a "reorg" will happen and people will be shuffled around, someone will get fired, and ultimately nothing will change. I've seen it happen over and over again.

Also, know that you don't owe your company jack shit. They are not, and will not be loyal to you, ever. Ever. They will cut you at first necessity. Be prepared to do the same at any time. Boss will blame manager, manager will blame you, people will get fired, unjustly or not. Probably unjustly. Bosses never fire themselves, ever. They will always place blame down the line. Always. Bank on it.

PROTIP You're new in your career: As long as you are employed, powersave a portion of your income into a separate savings area as F-U money -- so you can go 6 months or more that you can live on in between gigs. This gives you ultimate power over the boss: "If you don't like my work or my performance, F-U, I'm out."

Work to specification while you find a new job. Get the requirements via email or send a confirmation email for anything that you believe might be an "offhand remark".

The market is hot and jobs are currently plentiful.

Realize that a lot of the tech world reads this site so be careful.

Depends on the boss ofc. But i would send an email and ask for updated feedback after the discussion.

You're not responsable for changing requirements, so that's not your fault. Criticism for a junior developer is feedback.

I don't think you should take it to heart too much.

Get another job. Your management wants to Design and write code like the past. If they’re criticizing now it’ll never end and you will eventually be fired. I would get another job and just walk with zero notice. They won’t do you any favors in the future.

It sounds like you are taking flack for your manager's performance. You will take the flack rather than her for reasons. You'll figure it why eventually, I'm sure. If I were you I wouldn't put myself in this situation again.

One angle is that performance reviews are possibly tied to raises. Hence the boss ignoring things outside your control.

It may also be why hour manager was not there. Maybe your manager wanted no part of it.

Of course, the above is a paranoid, and cynical interpretation ..

It happens. Learn and move on.

Also, see if you can chat with the boss to clarify their expectations for you.

In the future, don't linger on a projects, no matter how fun you find it. The main principle should be "get it done." That's industry for you.

I've been blindsided like this before too. I didn't have a single 1-1 with my manager for 6 months, and then some negative feedback at the review meeting.

It hurt at the time but later on I discovered some other people were f*cked over too.

Start looking for a new job ASAP! Don’t get too emotionally attached to the actual work. I know it sucks, but the situation is not going to get better, only worse and based on what you said you’re working in a toxic environment.

It's unlikely the big boss treats anybody differently. Eventually that kind of toxicity eats away at the org. People saying not to worry perhaps haven't worked with people like this. Always be ready to make a move.

Proceed to work on your own startup on nights and weekends. Start with a side project that solves your own problem. Get small number of users and iterate till you get to product market fit. Then raise money...

This is going to sound harsh, but it's not meant to, it's not a criticism, but there are two things that first of all comes to mind: 1. It is absolutely irrelevant how hard you worked on something, "the company" does not care if you ground yourself down to the bone, or if you barely moved a finger. "The company" cares about the project being done on time and with the expected quality. I've had negative feedback on projects where I worked like a horse, because, well, it was hard and I didn't know how to do it.. And I've had positive feedback on projects where I did very little actual work, but knew what to do, and so, well, had a good relax before installing the library that solved all the problems.

2. Striving to please is natural, and dangerous, again, "the company" does not care about your good intentions, they'd rather have a working product of high quality delivered in scorn, than a late project that's not up to standard delivered with the best wishes.

That was the tough parts, but try to think of them as ways to change your own mindset, to protect yourself from a lot of negativity that's largely beyond your control and won't benefit anyone, but only be to your own detriment.

That said, it sounds like a startup to be honest, the boss sounds immature if they're bummed out by SOFTWARE BEING LATE.. And they should definitely have appreciated that if requirements change, it's their problem and responsibility rather than yours (or at least your managers) and probably the polite thing for them to do would be to apologize that they made you do that work that wasn't used, and relay to you that it's totally understandable to be bummed about that, but that it does happen from time to time..

About you taking your managers advice, well, it's hard to say, maybe your manager didn't understand the problem as well as you did (or should have done) and so it might in fact have been your responsibility to push back, but again, here a mature boss would have recognized not to expect push back from a fresh, non-senior hire, and accepted this as part of the learning process.

How to proceed ? If you're up for it, maybe arrange a meeting with your manager and boss, and relay your view of the situation, it was very well formulated, and their reaction and response will quickly reveal if that company is worth working for.. They probably shouldn't have to apologize exactly, but they should clear the air, show understanding and explain to you that it's gonna be okay. Any worse reaction tells me that they're not ready to be boss and manager.

Your boss and manager are just dumb, it is not your fault. You did the work you were told to, its actually all your managers fault. You will find out soon enough the spectrum of talent involved in managing.

Steve Jobs school of management by emotional manipulation. You can read about similar conversations on https://www.folklore.org

Doesn't sound like a terrible situation as a one-off considering you seem fairly happy there. Trust me. Learn and move on.

Communicate your concerns to your direct manager.

If similar things continue to happen, fire them. Simple.

Does your boss like you very, very much? Does their boss like them very, very much? Is your boss powerful within the org?

If all the answers to these are yes, you have nothing to worry about.

I wish it wasn't that way, but it is.

Talk to them. Tell them how you feel. People are usually more receptive than you may think, and managers / bosses who are not, are probably people you don’t want to be working for in the end.

The job market is hot, it won't take very long to find a better one.

I’ll go out on a limb here and just guess that this boss lives to bash the self-confidence of subordinates.

I realise there’s not a lot of evidence in what you said, but:

1) This is your first job, you’re not expected to know better. Your boss has clearly been in this career for a while to be in charge, so already knew this before criticising you.

2) Your boss telling you that you misunderstood a comment made by your manager is nonsense - he wasn’t there so he has no way of knowing. Not a fan of this word because it’s thrown around for everything, but that to me is transparent gaslighting.

3) You’re more-or-less solo, on a project that they clearly care about enough for it to be a problem - as a first job out of college. That’s just bad management, and no-one competent would expect that to work out - and yet from what you’ve said it has. Good job!

tldr; the problem is very likely not you, but watch out for this dude as there’s a lot of red flags here.

I'd ask for specific, clear expectations and rubric from your direct manager. You should never ever ever ever be blind sided by your skip. If you are, the manager is failing you.

juniors gotta junior. just kidding! keep your chin up and take the good advice and don't let the criticism get you down. manager may have made unrealistic deadline commitments and should be mad at himself not you. as for hiring more people to a project, that likely means the manager wants the project to be completed faster OR he doesn't want all his eggs in one basket (you). managers must constantly plan for worst case scenarios (like critical people leaving the company)

You still have a job and the project is done. Consider it a win. Learn from your mistakes, learn from things that did go well, just keep learning and move on (at the same job).

Mistakes are for learning. Admitting mistakes is the first step to solving. Your boss's style may be bad, but you can be sure that you cannot change his bad style.

I'm demotivated and my bosses say I'm too slow or not doing good work. I got a 4.4% effective pay cut.

I'm just sticking it out because I don't really have options.

sounds like you were just promoted to manager

i joke, but the experience you had would usually have been buffered by your manager, whos job it is to communicate with you about requirements and feedback from above

youre work does not define you. be careful letting these comments impact your perception of your self. equally, mine it for ways you could improve (if thats a goal of yours), raw feedback is the best feedback but accepting it is a muscle you have to work on slowly

The Boss's quarrel is with your manager, not with you. A pleasant and professional "I'm working at the direction of my manager" is warranted.

Actively approach them to start a discussion on how to improve. Propose regular 1:1 with them, let each know you talk to the other so no one feels left out.

> How should I proceed?

Send out resumes. Handwriting is on the wall.

Take the experience you gained, and keep changing jobs until you get one where you aren't used as a scapegoat. There are plenty out there!

> I had no idea that he felt this way before the meeting

This alone puts me on your side. Negative feedback shouldn't be a surprise (assuming its fair).

How long have you worked there? You say its your first job, and it makes a difference if you have been there 10 years or less than a year.

Welcome to the software industry! Baptism by fire... Dont sweat it. Lots of jobs out there. Maintain a good portfolio of past work.

Begin to interview on the side. You will be replaced in 3-4 weeks (or earlier).

If someone doesn’t like you, it’s very rare you will get them to change.

Be humble. Try to take his (possibly unfair) criticisms in stride.

Work harder, do better. Be open to correction, take this as a growth opportunity.

Please pose this question in /r/consulting as well. You'll get additional valuable input. Best of luck friend.

Figure out what you want out of this job and focus on getting that. If you cannot get it at this job then look elsewhere.

Plan to quit. Start looking for new jobs now. The boss has made his mind up about you - when the manager leaves or is transferred you'll be gone next.

I have been in this situation and the reality is there is just nothing you can do to salvage it.

It sounds like you've been there nearing a year and you've delivered a project - perfectly good reasons to be moving on when you've basically been given a warning that they're thinking about canning you.

i'd say getting rid of first impressions is really hard and maybe better off finding a new job in next 6 months

Failure happens in a system, not an individual. Your boss is a attributing systemic failure to a Junior developer.

Get some time with the boss. Share what you accomplished, ask them what they thought of your work.

We can’t convince everyone. Be in a place where you are appreciated. This is life. Just move on.

Keep doing your best, learn everything you can, then decide where to take your career.

I’m pretty sure you’re about to be fired. You should give your notice as soon as possible and immediately look for a new position. Getting fired should normally not come as a surprise to you. If it does you’d have to be completely clueless, or there are things going on outside your control. You seem self conscious so the former seems unlikely.

To put it plainly, sometimes companies know they do not have the resources to meet a deadline and to deliver a feature or product with the shape and quality they have promised.

When that deadline fails to be met, middle managers need someone's head to roll in order to avoid being blamed themselves.

At that moment, middle managers start conspiring against some of their subordinates, and they often build an argument that some engineer is not "performing well enough" or some other similar claim.

The key is that at companies with this kind of culture the burden of proof is placed on the defense. Meaning that if your manager claims you are not meeting their expectations, it's on you to prove you are performing well enough, and at that point you are pretty much fucked, because they can simply say they don't believe you (the entire point of it is to shift blame, no matter how esoterical the thought process is).

Ultimately, you need to think about your own wellbeing and if you are willing to work under some sociopath. You can add all the layers you want to the problem, but it comes down to some people making fake promises and having some coworkers or employees pay for those lies.

Do your best to be successful, and when it’s time, go where you’re appreciated.

Have you talked with your fellow workers about unionization? Fire your boss :)

Start fishing around for a new job. Trust me the headache is not worth it.

Everything you've said so far indicates your immediate manager is the problem. Although her boss seems like a dolt too.

Examples: 1) "The deadline was pushed back..." - Hey it happens, but why did the initially-chosen deadline turn out to be unrealistic? Why did the team not meet the deadline? She should not only be able to answer those questions but be willing to take ultimate responsibility for everything happening with her team and her projects.

2) "busy putting out a fire" - In the short-term, maybe not her fault, but as short-term becomes long-term, "fires" become more and more her own fault.

3) Due to the alleged "fire," she didn't show up to the meeting with you and her boss, which is disrespectful to both. Also possibly inefficient (does a manager really need to be the one to personally put out said "fire?"), but that judgment-call depends on the nature of the "fire," which you haven't revealed. Anyway she left you, an individual contributor who is not managing the project, to take criticism about the management of the project. Bad design decisions, often not a management issue, became one when she insisted on hers. Meanwhile, changing requirements, well those are 100% a management problem from the getgo. And the delays. A management problem. Why are you answering for management decisions and management problems? That kind of feedback is normally delivered to someone who has the global big-picture bird's-eye view etc., i.e. the manager. For that matter, just as a matter of protocol, isn't that kind of feedback normally delivered to a direct report rather than two levels down? You said it yourself, "I had no idea..." That's right and why would you? (Well if it was something you should've known, then there was no way for you to know it except by your boss conveying it, so she failed again. Or, it was always her problem to begin with. Either way, she failed.)

4) According to him, you've been screwing up - how would he know that? From her, who has apparently been throwing you under the bus. Like why would you even have been invited to this three-way meeting that really should've been between her & him? Unless she had already started linking the failings (her failings) to you, such that you were an important or even relevant attendee to the meeting. She screws up, she blames you. That's not what a leader does. Meanwhile I bet he's in love with her and finds her blameless in every way. (I'm joking a little bit, but not entirely. Watch them together sometime if you think I'm onto something, and see what you think.)

The thing is, whether any of these points are her fault or not, she is supposed to step up and take responsibility for them and not throw underlings under the bus. That's why she gets the big bucks. If an underling is answering for these things, then WTF put the underling in the manager's chair.

Anyway, based on my reading between the lines of your comments, which I know are only telling your side of the story, I don't think you're going to stay happy in this job. It's going to get more and more shitty, especially if she gets away with it this time. I think you ought to enumerate to the two-levels-up boss all the reasons why you think that whole thing was unfair. Write all the points down on cards if you have to. Stand your ground. He ought to respect your nerve, or if not, if he sees you as a petty threat then you are working for petty people. Hopefully I've given you some perspective or a way of articulating or thinking about things. It's your very first job so you're not as good at spotting this kind of douchebaguerie (Fr.)(JK) or even knowing that it's not normal. Well, strike that, you definitely can tell it's not normal, as your feelings are trying to tell you, so good on ya for listening to them.

You can leave or you can bare it. But definitely don't carry it.

Reframe what's considered your failures as process failures

i would wonder if the boss just had a meeting with their higher up and got told off, and were frustrated and took it out on you. Not fair at all, but people can be people

Get a new job. Your boss and her boss are bad, not worth it.

Being surprised by this convo probably means your manager did a poor job of communicating (or you did a poor job of listening to what your manager was saying).

You should be having biweekly (or better yet weekly) 1 on 1s with your boss. For the most part, you shouldn't be surprised by things if you have a good rapport with your manager.

I think you'll be fine, but be sure to communicate things with your boss as soon as they come up. Also, don't just come to your boss with problems, but bring solutions as well.

If you have a tech lead on your team try building a rapport with them as well. They'll be busy, but they'll ideally be in a position where many of their goals will be mentoring based. Leverage this to learn about the projects, company, and the culture.

Sounds like you can’t handle criticism.

One of my mentors when I was kinda taking things harsh like it appears you are, said to me “There’s two kinds of experiences in life. Winning experiences and Learning experiences”. So I said to him, “what about when I feel like I’m just not good enough”, to which he said, “Well, that would be a losing experience”.

Take the lessons wherever they come.

And if it were me, I wouldn’t let my head beat me up over this, I’d just ask boss man if I was meeting or exceeding his expectations or coming up short.

Not suprised considering your boss is a woman - I guess she just got emotional or she just doesn't like you.

Leave and find a better place.

Find a new job.

don't admire your colleagues.

> should have been finished a long time ago and he can't believe it's taken this long etc

You are working for someone who works for a psychopath. Time for new job.

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.

> How should I proceed?

Well I can tell you one thing for certain: this won't matter in a year... no matter what. Congratulations on making it into the field of software development with what I assume is a bachelors in computer science. You're basically set for the next ten years at least, guaranteed. There are so many vacancies in this field.

I've had petty bosses like this. Personally or professionally, I'd never talk to a junior developer like this. Or a senior developer for that matter. A senior dev and I would have had so many check ins and conversations before this meeting you had that it would be impossible for such a meeting to happen. Bosses like your boss' boss love to focus on the timeline without any of the details. For this, they are worse than worthless in their occupation. It seems likely your manager's manager failed to address a changing requirement in time, got burned by their superior for it, scared your manager away with their rage, and took it upon themselves to take it out on you. Again, just my intuition but it's rarely wrong. I've been doing this for a long time and I've worked at every type of company imaginable from govt to startup to corporate.

You probably graduated last May/June so you'll be up on your year soon (again, a guess). I'd start looking for other opportunities as you'll almost be guaranteed a 20%+ raise changing jobs and zero negative consequences for doing so. If you choose to stay here, great, but regardless, it will make you feel better to see higher offers from other places where you'll likely meet great people who can mentor you properly, proactively, and with enthusiasm. What your manager is doing is called seagull management, it's a little graphic of a term but look it up ;) It's a contribution to a company that my software engineering professor would call "worse than worthless".

I've had a few jobs with know-nothing bosses. It's a nightmare and leaves you feeling bad about your diligent and hard work. If everything was going well with zero constructive or negative feedback, and all of a sudden, there's a problem and a big problem at that, where the blame is placed on you without any sort of detailed explanation or further indication, it's a sign there's something wrong up the chain that has nothing to do with you. Pathetic, petty managers will always try to blame their subordinates for their own failures.

I would never let one of my junior devs with their first job out of college take the fall for a deadline or give them feedback like this because I possess the seemingly rare quality of empathy in software development and know it would be one of the biggest contributions of negative value to the company to do so. I would instead take responsibility for my failure to handle a deadline as that's what a real lead dev does. And if my junior dev was given too much work I'd help them or do it myself.

You can of course always look at other code in the company to see if something has been done. So can your boss. Given that those two have more experience with this field than you do, both at this company and in general (allegedly at least) it is something they should have proactively taken upon themselves, ideally in cooperation with you long before this meeting. They also have a duty to communicate with and mentor junior devs. You're not a senior lead with years of experience, you're a recent graduate with an invaluable set of skills and understanding of computational science that you developed over a period of years. You need a little bit of mentoring to learn the ins and outs of the business world in the context of your rare and precious talent. That should be done warmly and with great enthusiasm from your mentors. This is often not the case. For me it is far and away the most satisfying part of my job to mentor juniors who want to learn. Unfortunately, you're going to have to work a little to seek out likeminded people, they're not in every company. If any one of the people that ever worked under me blamed a dev for their poor project management skills they'd get quite an earful from me, I assure you. I'd fire a repeat offender who needlessly destroys the morale and enthusiasm of anyone without hesitation.

I felt obligated to reply at length because a lot of the comments in this thread are giving you terrible advice. I dealt with horrible support systems early on in my career and got so much terrible advice from other engineers. Lack of empathy and humanity is a massive problem in our community. You clearly have a desire to do good and are sensitive to feedback and I can't help but feel that your talent and good nature is being wasted here. Never forget you are the talent. Without yourself and the other developers producing software your manager would not have a thing to manage. I think you needed to hear that today. Repeat after me: I am the talent. You need me, I don't need you.

Please stay positive. As the Brits say, keep calm and carry on. It's all you can do here. Do that and keep your passion and you're indestructible. It's a hard thing to realize that so many people have no idea what they're doing but this ordeal you've been through will be helpful education in that respect!

If it were me that got talked to like that I'd be furious.

It's totally unprofessional to tell someone they expected the project to be done earlier and criticize your code when it's in a completed state.

Especially if that someone DOESN'T EVEN WORK DIRECTLY WITH YOU #wtf.

You're a junior dev... It's the company's responsibility to provide the adequate processes and mentoring to enable you to grow, and to provide real-time feedback (pair programming / code reviews / presentations / whiteboarding etc).

Also, it's totally unprofessional not to have all the people present in the meeting that are responsible for the delivery of the project. If the manager wasn't there it should have been rescheduled.

In my weathered state as a developer, I'd probably have the balls to write all these points down, and to ask for a meeting with the boss. If they reacted with further gas lighting I'd immediately take my resignation out of my back pocket and hand it to them.

There are a few old consulting tricks to doing this effectively:

Phrase the points as follows:

* Start your point with what you observed or something that is non-subjective

* Avoid saying "you" in a sentence (this is to avoid confrontation and getting someone on the defensive).

* Also, use "we" to make it seem like "we're all in this together as a team" - even if it's just you you're talking about.

* Start how the action made you _feel_. People cannot disagree with your feelings.

* Hear the other person out

* State what you think would be the appropriate approach for next time.

e.g. "In the meeting the other day, a point was made that the project wasn't completed in the time it was expected.

When this point was made, to be honest, it made me feel resentful, as I always put a great deal of care into my work. It also made me feel like I wasn't valued as a team member. I also felt dismissed and not heard out when I explained why things had been done the way that had been.

# wait for reaction

I was thinking about how to improve this situation in the future. First of all, if we find ourselves in this situation again could we make sure that everyone is in the meeting that needs to be? Secondly, I appreciate receiving feedback, however I feel that to do it at the end of a project is much too late. If that's important to you, could we do this more regularly? ... "

This way, if the boss ever tries to hit you up again at the end of a project, you can bring up the conversation that you had in the past. Apply the same methodology to your discussion and you'll end up on top and make them look like the ass they are.

Reading between the lines here...

> he basically tells me this project should have been finished a long time ago

Your boss' boss will always say this. The problem is the person in between. That person has been too afraid to tell their boss why things are running late, or can't. Basically, your boss has to stick up for you to their boss and take the heat and pass it down.

> 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.)

Ooof. This person may be covering for your boss for some reason (human or otherwise). This sounds like a bad dynamic. For example, he might be cutting her slack for some reason.

> 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

ALWAYS push back on these. It is your job to (at least try hard to) stand firm on the original plan and if they want to make changes midstream, you must demand more time in exchange (as much as you think is necessary, and then add 50%). It is already hard enough as a developer to plan timely releases WITHOUT the ground shifting underneath you. It is your responsibility to make that clear. And you should be communicating on expectations regularly... in consulting that's called "managing expectations" and it's a good life skill generally.

> He did also make some criticisms that I thought were fair

It's always fine to acknowledge these.

> I have no clue what happened in that meeting and I haven't heard anything about it from either of them since.

Worry about the things you can control; there's no point to worrying about things you can't.

> 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'm still thinking that the problem is your immediate boss. Also, you should absolutely voice this concern to her.

> and I'm thinking that now they probably feel that they could fire me if they wanted and not lose much.

Two things. Don't screw over that guy just because you're afraid of that. And also, if it came to that, it's a fairly hot hiring market. Don't be afraid. Of all the times I've been let go (and there've been quite a few, partly because I had undiagnosed sleep apnea for YEARS), I always ended up in a better place.

> it feels like an inauspicious start.

It's true that your first few months at a company are judged harsher than after, because you haven't proven yourself yet. Just do a course correct and check in with boss on requirements more frequently if they are subject to change, and always push back on changes and press for more time, because you'll need it... midstream changes aren't magically easy to do. Don't burn time on making fancy abstract mechanisms, just focus on the simplest code that does the job, and always cover it with tests (make sure to incorporate that into your total dev time...)

If they still end up firing you anyway, it's OK, you did your best. Like I said, worry about the things you can control... if your boss and boss' boss have a weird dynamic which affects the perception of you, that's unfortunately not something you have control over

Good luck!

Two common themes stand out throughout your post:

1) Dysfunctional communication

2) Rumination.

Starting with the dysfunctional communication: It seems there are a lot of communications and expectations that aren't making their way to you. It's reasonable for your manager to buffer some communications from above rather than dumping a firehose of everything on to you, but this sounds like you're missing out on important information relevant to your job.

However, you now have some clarity into these communication gaps. Use that to your advantage. Next time there's a question around a deadline being pushed back, ask specifically why it was pushed back and what your skip-level manager thinks about it. Did they push it back because you were originally behind progress? Or did they push it back because it wasn't needed as quickly any more? Don't speculate, ask.

There's another place where you need to ask for clarity, largely because your manager isn't great at it: Performance management:

> 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.

Don't hesitate to ask your manager for clarification about expectations. You can ask for a quick chat to recap the project. Explain how you were confused about why the project was considered late if the deadline was pushed back and ask for clarification. Ask how you should proceed in the future. Ask what's expected of you (or employees in the company in general) for positive performance reviews. Again, don't speculate. Ask.

The second problem in your post is heavy rumination. It's natural to feel disappointed in this outcome, but you cannot let it eat you up. The more you let this control your thoughts, the more it's going to negatively influence your work, which could lead to more disappointment in an unhelpful spiral. You must avoid this at all costs.

Some examples from your post of what I'm referring to:

> 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

> I'm thinking that now they probably feel that they could fire me if they wanted and not lose much.

> I wanted to make them happy to have hired me, and now I feel like they probably aren't.

It's very natural to feel disappointment, uncertainty, and concern. However, how you react to these feelings will dictate your path in the future. If you let this demoralize you or, worse, start bitterly resenting everything about the company, it's not going to end well.

Acknowledge that this is a mere stumbling block, but it doesn't define your job or even your career. It's a learning experience, but it's not the end of the road. If you take it in stride and use what you've learned to iterate on communication and delivery with your next task, things will go much better. This may feel poignant to you, but I guarantee everyone else is going to completely forget about it by this time 6 months from now.

You have a horrible manager that should have either been in that meeting or rescheduled it while they were "putting out fires" (big red flag)

This is your first job out of college, I assume they know that.

How you should proceed is to just shrug your shoulders and say, "ok boomer"

There are thousands of workplace to go. Weird this is not the main answer

I am late to the party, but I also wanted to suggest learning to develop techniques for dealing with “this kind of attack.”

This may not be the last time you have this energy directed your way.

Your options are:

1. Make excuses or argue or “explain”

Looks really weak and doesn’t garner respect. Especially from asshole managers. Arguing will inflame them, they will take it as disrespect.

If they are in a mood to send a message, then explaining won’t get you anywhere. They want to yell at you to feel powerful. Explaining won’t help.

2. Take the beating

Just listen and don’t say anything. Neutral strategy, you don’t win or lose anything. But you also don’t prevent situation in the future.

If this is a one time thing, maybe it never happens again and you are better avoiding any escalation.

You turn into a doormat eventually, you are giving them a “free move.”

3. Restate their complaint before they complain (take their weapons away)

This is an extreme pro maneuver. If you have a truly aggressive boss, and I have had a few, you can anticipate their attacks in advance and state them up front.

This kind of managers attacks are often predictable.

This technique leaves your attacker with absolutely nothing to say. I use this on my own Manager to diffuse them.

This is a very powerful method, because you have to be willing to understand the situation from their view in advance.

Open the meeting with “so I know you are angry about how slowly this project has been going and probably think I suck at coding is that right? … “

This technique comes from the book “never split the difference.” You try to trigger them to agree with you up front. Once you do that; they are out of ammunition.

Lean into the punches takes the power away from them. But this requires extreme skill.

4. Blame on others by taking responsibility for their actions

This is a technique from the book “Stealing The Corner Office.”

You make your manager look weak by taking responsibility for misinterpreting them.

“I think I must be responsible because I misinterpreted Manager X when he said Y. I will work with X to clarify my understanding.”

This is kind of a passive aggressive strategy which indirectly blames your manager and makes it sound like he is actually the problem.

Anyways, I recommend reading both the books I mentioned earlier.

With aggressive managers I prefer to lean into the punches and take their attacks away.