[shawnps]

I've only seen advice so far on how you can "get faster", but I believe the real issue here is that you are being perceived as being slow by a manager who might not know the value of what you are doing.

I had a manager tell me I was slow at one of my last jobs as well.

A few months later, I was having trouble convincing her to give me a promotion/raise. I knew I was doing the same amount of work as everyone else, if not more, and I was fixing a lot of bugs caused by developers 2 or 3 levels above me. Our 1 on 1 meetings consisted of me listing the reasons why I deserved a raise, and my manager telling me no, but never a good reason why. She even read me the guidelines for what the company looks for in engineers at each level, and I was doing all of it and more, but still no raise.

I ended up quitting (not just because of the pay), and taking my skills to an awesome new job where I was considered a top engineer, and I'm really proud of everything I got done there. The new company gave me a raise when I asked for it because they valued me more than my previous company.

My personal advice is to look for a new job where you can apply your skills where the company needs them, and make a good impression from the beginning. The added bonus being that you'll be able to negotiate a higher salary with the new job as well.

[hga]

Indeed; one of the very most frustrating jobs I ever had, my last at a Lisp company, ended up "pitting" me against a very junior programmer, who was a flurry of obvious activity, including lots of debugging. I put in less hours (but still a lot, it was a pre-launch startup), often took a nap in the afternoon, was much quieter in a way, only asking questions about the code base and e.g. asking for one procedure to be coded in assembler to make the editor we were working on fast enough, etc.

My output of working code and functionality was a lot higher, I removed entropy from the code base (the other guy at best didn't add a lot), and ended up being demoted and then quitting in disgust. In vague mitigation we were reporting to the 3 founders and friends who'd all gone to the same school and this was their first attempt to manage others, but....

I don't know if your situation is akin, but it does sound like there's, realistic or not, an unbridgeable gap between you and your manager(s), and its time to find another job with a better fit before the company takes worse actions.

[bottombutton]

This struck a chord.

[Edit] I had an essay explaining why, but long story short... it's just that I had the same experiences on my old team as you described, so I left out of frustration for what I consider my dream job. Now it feels ruined because I can't really start fresh, and I moved halfway across the country to take this new role. How are we doing on time travel? Any progress?