Senior coworker confronted me for making mistakes

 


For some background, I graduated in December 2020 and started working with my current company at the beginning of 2021. Up until about a month ago, I hadn’t been assigned to any projects where I was writing code, so I haven’t had a chance to learn how to actually apply what I learned in school. After bringing this up to my manager, I was finally put on a project with two other developers: one senior and one mid-level.

Now that I’m on my first ever professional software project, I’m a bit overwhelmed. Its been a slow learning process, but I’ve been getting all of my tasks done accurately and on time with some assistance. My manager even told me that I was performing well and to keep up the good work.

Well, in the last sprint, I finished two of my tasks and created a PR for each of them. They sat there for about two weeks waiting for review, even though my coworkers were reviewing and completing their own PRs in the meantime. I created another PR for another finished task and turned my attention to my old PRs.

I had to resolve so many merge conflicts because now the dev branch was way ahead of any of my branches waiting for review. Unfortunately, merging the dev code with those branches caused some issues in the code that I didn’t catch when I pushed back to the remote branch; all the while, there were some other issues with the code that I wrote that weren’t caught until my senior coworker finally reviewed one of the branches.

I made some changes, wrote my tests, and pushed to the remote branch. Then I solved some merge conflicts, unknowingly adding a duplicate test to one of the test files. The next thing I know, my senior coworker is calling me on Teams to let me know that the project won’t build with my changes.

He went on a fifteen-minute rant about how he’s tired of me making mistakes and how it’s frustrating to him that I keep pushing code that isn’t perfect. I was under the impression that’s why we code review in the first place, but I guess not. I fixed the build error in a few minutes and the only other issue with my code was a cosmetic issue that didn’t change the intended functionality at all, it just made the site a little less polished, but, again, isn’t that what code review is for?

Anyway, the call lasted about forty minutes and most of it was him berating me for “pushing terrible quality code” and how it’s “so frustrating that I keep making mistakes.”

I have a lot of social anxiety and really don’t like confrontation, so be honest and tell me if I’m being overly dramatic, but I really feel like I’m being treated pretty poorly. Again, this is quite literally the first time that I have ever worked on a professional project and I’ve never used any of the techs we’re working with until now.

Please share your thoughts because I want to know if I’m getting worked up over nothing or if this is genuinely a bad work environment for a junior like me.


JA:

Tell your manager what’s happened and then ask him/her to speak to the senior dev. The senior dev is more likely to listen to someone on his level or higher where there is no power imbalance.

He’s borderline bullying you, it won’t get better. Stop it now before he robs all your confidence.

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