How do you guys handle receiving criticism to things you think you're doing well (or maybe not)?

I've been in my current role at my company for almost a year and I think I'm seen as good talent, but I have a hard time translating critical feedback from "we're telling you this so we can see you grow" and instead I hear "you are doing that wrong, do this instead."

It drives me nuts because I always think I'm failing.

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

Our workplace has so many... But perhaps was this useless guy who claimed to be a member of Mensa, who would wear no shoes into the bathroom, place his lunch beneath the urinal when he peed, prop himself up by leaning on the urinal, and top it off by not washing his hands.

🤢

Anything developed in-house for enterprise use

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

Don't be afraid to question senior devs as you go through your career. You'll learn a lot yourself, and any senior worth their salt will be open to the dialog. You'll learn a lot about the topic and potentially about the people you work with. Never stop learning and stay relevant with technology.

Everyone expects you to work your "magic" and get shit done... But nobody thanks you or gives a shit when you do.

I got these a while ago, but I finally got around to attaching them. Thanks @dfox and @trogus!

I'm so fucking sick of pouring hours of work into providing application code for someone who could give two shits about what I've done -- instead he completely fixates on what's missing or broken -- nevermind that I completely eliminated a bad UI thread bottleneck.

Sometimes I swear that coding is a thankless job and people just expect miracles.

The irony...

I fully expect the face to be rubbed off at this rate... Thanks @dfox and @trogus!

I have discovered the power of YourKit. Really helped me track down the problem of a ton of threads and a slow application.

Sleep.

Usually, after sleeping, the clearing of the mind opens up a lot of possibilities and more often than not, a solution comes quickly after. Happens to me all the time.

This also applies when you finally reach 150 +1's and now the limit is 175...

When you have a super annoying problem that Google has been unable to help with... But you stumble upon a link with the exact title matching your issue... And clicking on it gives you a 404.

Any of the Microsoft APIs

Every damn day.

[on git] "how can I use the remote to see what's on my local computer? How do I know if someone else has cloned so I don't edit their files?"

By itself, not terribly stupid... Git can be complicated... But this is coming from people who are supposed to be familiar with basic CM, but aren't.

That feeling when you're working on a server plugin that uses Velocity and a simple typo in your generated Javascript forces you to wait a literal minute for a recompile...

Debugging a Velocity template issue the other day where I was presenting a firm to the user to fill in some data. Whenever the user had entered in one or more lines, a 'true' kept showing up cryptically before the form. Drove me fucking nuts because there was nowhere in the template code that was printing before the form input.

Turns out it was the output of a $list.add(...) being rendered to the screen.

Spent 40 mins on that shit.

😐🔫

Interviewed at a pseudo-startup (not quite a startup, but later realized run and organized like one) where the VP of dev ops seemed eager to have me in. I sent him my code sample and he said he'd schedule an onsite. Weeks went by without a peep.

Being persistent, I kept emailing, figuring the environment still might be worth the apparent lack of interest... Eventually the dude told me he'd been away on "travel" and he didn't check his mail. He said come on by if I was still interested...

I went in and met with a couple people on the team, interviewed (I think) well and he said he'd be in touch. Another two weeks -- nothing. I emailed again, he said they hadn't reached a decision. By this time, I'd pretty much written it off. I never heard anything back. No good, no bad.

Moral of the story, don't waste your time on anyone who doesn't respect it enough to give you theirs.

I wanna watch that one

Attention developers: testicles. That is all.

Use your pull requests guys, you don't wanna see this guy in your terminal

Rule #1 about devRant... No names. Never know when they'll sign up, see it, and make the connection. That's gonna make for some awkward elevator silence.

The guy who claimed he belonged to Mensa, wore socks into the bathroom, and slept at his desk. #mostannoyingcoworker

When you come up with a really good app idea and it turns up on a Play Store search

Robin can't use Vim...

I prep for interviews/projects by practicing code in the steam on the shower door.

What if...