My senior software engineer keeps telling me my tasks are trivial but doesn’t explain why they are trivial. Sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my time. I find it increasingly difficult to talk to him because I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job. I know everyone learns at their own pace and I am learning new things and concepts every day. But I don’t feel like I’m learning well or fast enough.

Anyone have any communication advice?

Negotiation is your tool. Sorry, cannot advise something in particular.

Write down, what you want - from him, from the company, from yourself; and then request a one -to-one. Explain your struggles, your situation and your point of view.

Sounds like a senior ass.

Is he serious? One senior of my place says that to play with us.

Do you have the feeling they are trivial tasks or do you experience difficulties with them... what i should do is jot down every single trivial task and find out myself why they are trivial. Shove it under his senior old ass. And tell him you want to do some more serious tasks.

I'm in a somewhat similar situation.
I just started at this company a few months ago, and they started by giving me ridiculously easy tasks -- one-line changes -- which I took awhile on because I wanted to understand the code around them, not just make a quick patch.

After a few of those, they gave me larger tickets; one of them a full CRUD feature in isolation. easy enough.

But now they're giving me huge tasks that touch a lot of the codebase -- very intricate parts that require a lot of code spelunking and archaeology. The full specs alone take 28-35 hours to run, depending on hardware, and since my feature can break untold areas, I don't know which specs I need to run. Also, some of the code is very fragile, or behavies in very unexpected and probably-incorrect ways, such as instantiating an empty object and later discarding it, but the accepted place for validations in this codebase are on instantiation, not creation, leading to difficult-to-approach issues.

The point, though, is that my boss is getting irritated with me because this is taking longer than he'd like. I sort of understand, but he should have given this project to someone with much more knowledge of the system. Maybe then it would have gotten done in 1-2 weeks instead of a month.

At the same time, I also have two small children and nowhere quiet to work (plus being sick), so I'm putting in effectively ~3 hours a day instead of the usual 8. (actually 9, since that's my norm.)

Monster project, given to the sick new girl, and getting irritated that she's not as fast as the other seniors. GG.