HACKER Q&A
📣 Meteora95

How do you recover after a bad PR review or implementation?


Hi, sorry if this is wrong to put here.

I'd been working on a feature for my team and today, I got a few more PR comments and feedback about it than you might want (like 20+ comments on PR).

It was a feature that touched a bit of everywhere in the codebase, relatively large. I'm a feeling down about making a bit of a mess of it, afraid I'm not very good at my job.

I have 3.5 years experience. I started in this role about 6 months ago and haven't gotten bad feedback from my manager, no performance issues or anything like that,just some feedback that I should speak up more in discussions.

The team is spread across 3 six person pods and everyone is on each pull request. It's awesome because I get many PoV's and great feedback, but sometimes the PR comments can pile up. It's such an arbitrary source to base my worth on but I'm afraid that people will take a poor PR like this one and see me as deadweight. My quality can dip up and down. Sometimes a feature goes really well and other times It doesn't go quite as well.

I'm always eager to learn and take on feedback - one of the leads said I was taking on knowledge a lot faster than he expected - but I see all of the areas I don't know as well in the project, I see the people who've been on the project longer than me and think "wow, I'm awful compared to this developer/because I don't know this". I'm afraid of being the weak link on the team.

It doesn't help that 3 months in I got pulled onto another project (alongside 5 other people from the aforementioned project), so my knowledge base about this system has gotten rusty. This is my first feature back on the original team.

I'm young(25) and I've had confidence issues and anxiety since being a teen.

I would love to discuss and hear your thoughts and experiences on the topic. How did you bounce back? Am I being a little sensitive? Have you ever felt this way too? Have you ever seen someone else go through this, how did it go??


  👤 otras Accepted Answer ✓
I actually just wrote a blog post the other week about this exact feeling: https://alexanderell.is/posts/me-and-my-work/

I think it’s very important to separate your work from your worth and to view review comments as reviews of your code, not of your ability to write code.