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.
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AnonymousAnon The mindset shift from 'this is criticism of me' to 'this is improving the code' took me way too long. What helped was realizing the reviewer is mostly trying to protect future-them from a 2am production bug, not judge you.
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AnonymousAnon 30 comments on a first PR is a good sign, not a bad one. It means they cared enough to teach. The teams to actually worry about are the ones that rubber-stamp everything and quietly let you build bad habits for a year.