Give me an example of a tough or critical piece of feedback you received.

One tough piece of feedback I got during my first few months was that I waited too long to ask for help when I was stuck. My mentor pointed out that I would spend hours trying to debug something on my own, and by the time I raised it, the ticket was already at risk. That was hard to hear because I thought being independent was the right thing to do, but I realized I was optimizing for looking self-sufficient instead of making steady progress. After that, I started writing down what I had tried and asking for help once I had exhausted two reasonable approaches or been blocked for more than an hour. I also began posting short updates when I hit uncertainty instead of waiting until the end of the day. A month later, my mentor told me my updates made it much easier to unblock me early, and my work stopped slipping for that reason.

Early in my first job a lead pulled me aside and said my pull requests were too large and detailed — they took too long to review and hid important changes, which caused integration delays. That stung because I pride myself on delivering complete, well-tested work, but I realized I was trading thoroughness for slow feedback cycles. I started breaking features into smaller, runnable increments, adding concise PR descriptions that called out the risk areas, and including focused tests so reviewers could trust the change quickly. Within a few sprints reviews were much faster, I caught integration issues earlier, and the product team appreciated that I was delivering usable progress more frequently.