Title: Dear HN,<p>I&#x27;m working my first job out of college and I really enjoy it. I get to do fun computer vision stuff, write Rust, great pay, great benefits, short commute, etc. And my manager and her boss are both super smart.<p>However I&#x27;m a bit frustrated. I thought I was doing well - I&#x27;m working hard on the project I was assigned to, and it&#x27;s coming along nicely. The deadline was pushed back once (which that seems to be very common at this company), and the new deadline is still in the future.<p>Two weeks ago, my manager&#x27;s boss schedules a meeting with me and my manager. My manager is busy putting out a fire so it&#x27;s just me and the boss, and the boss made a some of criticisms of me. I&#x27;ve been thinking about them and I can&#x27;t shake the feeling that some of them were kind of unfair. (To be clear, I absolutely did make some mistakes on this project that contributed to it taking longer than it had to.)<p>First, he basically tells me this project should have been finished a long time ago and he can&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s taken this long etc. I had no idea that he felt this way before the meeting - I&#x27;ve mostly just been working to get it done before the revised deadline my manager gave me.<p>He looks at the code and criticizes design decisions, some of which were made largely on my manager&#x27;s explicit suggestions. (When I bring this up, he says I probably just misinterpreted an offhand comment of hers as a hard requirement.)<p>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&#x27;s no longer necessary due to changing requirements, which I don&#x27;t think I could have forseen. I don&#x27;t think the boss appreciates that and just sees that the amount of usable output is low for the amount of time I&#x27;d been working.<p>He did also make some criticisms that I thought were fair. For instance he said I should have looked at other projects to see how they accomplished what I&#x27;m trying to do. That definitely would have been a good idea.<p>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&#x27;t heard anything about it from either of them since.<p>As of today the project is pretty much done (save for some procedural details). I&#x27;m happy, but I can&#x27;t stop thinking about that meeting. I really did work hard, so it&#x27;s demotivating that it feels like the result of me working hard is unappreciated.<p>I&#x27;m not thinking of quitting over this or anything, but it seriously bums me out. I don&#x27;t know if I have a future at this company if the boss thinks I&#x27;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&#x27;s super smart and capable, and I&#x27;m thinking that now they probably feel that they could fire me if they wanted and not lose much.<p>But the saddest part is that I really admire my manager and my boss, and I wanted to make them happy to have hired me, and now I feel like they probably aren&#x27;t. I guess I can try to learn from my mistakes and get over it, but at the very least it feels like an inauspicious start.<p>How should I proceed?
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