My first code review at work bruised my ego badly. It ended up being the best thing for my growth.

First real PR at my first job came back with something like 30 comments. Naming, edge cases I missed, a whole function I'd written that already existed in a util file. I closed my laptop and genuinely wondered if they'd made a hiring mistake.

What I didn't get at first: none of it was personal, and the senior who left most of them spent real time explaining the why. Once I stopped reading reviews as 'you're bad' and started reading them as free mentorship, I improved faster than any tutorial ever made me.

If your first reviews sting, that's normal. It means someone's actually paying attention to your growth.