[gjvc]

> On a few occasions I tried to make proposals but they were heavily criticized.

I'm going to overload on metaphors, I hope you don't mind. :-) Sounds like perhaps you are encountering a cultural impedance mismatch. While you might be thinking that the way forward on some project is to get some shared knowledge and understanding of a problem you see needing a solution, this can sometimes be taken as idle speculation, when in fact it's an earnest attempt at vigorous debate.

If you find yourself in this situation, stop, relax, and take a deep breath. As others have noted, "trying / working harder" will not work. You need to try a different approach to get a different outcome.

Remember, in smaller outfits, "implementation is 9/10ths of the law". If you have some running code which solves or automates a problem, and is presented well, then only the most foolhardy of people will stand in your way. See if you can work up a prototype / proof of concept on the quiet, then demonstrate it. If it's truly worthwhile, or even if it isn't the reception you get should be all the message you need as to what to do next.

If all else fails, quit. No matter where you are, the opportunity set afforded by the world at large is bigger than your current situation. That's reason enough to be cheerful. Good luck. :-)

[hehsjsbb]

Ironically I'm a "implementation is 9/10ths of the law" believer, the proposals were PRs and working demos. Despite being a small start-up the team is not really into iterative development so much as lots of up-front planning and theory followed by big polished PRs.

I agree if I'm going to succeed I'll need to change my approach. I usually learn by doing and experimenting but it's tough to make incremental changes here to understand the codebase better

[gjvc]

Wow. That's tough. If a working demo doesn't convince them, I'm not sure what will. "See this? Do you want this?" is a pretty simple question. Do they need more evidence of unit- and integration testing? Do they need some/more user feedback before proceeding?

Remember, some people don't listen to reason, some of your wise seed will fall on rocky ground, and don't try to teach a pig to sing. I'll stop now :-) Best of luck again.

[hehsjsbb]

It's mostly code quality / style / archtectural objections. Some of which are understandable since I'm new to the codebase and it's a prototype to show the feature, but taken together all the feedback basically rewrote the entire feature. I've pretty consistently had better experiences contributing to large open source codebases than getting a feature into this codebase so I don't necessarily think it's that I'm bad at receiving feedback?

[terminalcommand]

They might be seeing you as a threat, because they think you might be trying to steal their light.

[gjvc]

I used to not want to believe this kind of thing, but when I started to believe in it, quite a few situations became simple to understand.