The problem here, and you'll encounter it with clients and seniors throughout your career, is that your senior/boss doesn't have enough time, or thinks they don

The problem here, and you'll encounter it with clients and seniors throughout your career, is that your senior/boss doesn't have enough time, or thinks they don't have enough time, to supervise your work correctly and thus comes in at the last minute and drops hidden requirements/fundamental changes on you. It's very common. If you want to avoid this, you're going to have to make it your job to point out potential flaws and hurdles in your work as you come across them, to ask only for essential and broad-strokes guidance up front, and to find/fix smaller issues yourself as you go along without bothering the higher ups. Your senior probably genuinely wasn't aware of the deeper issues with your work because they just didn't have time to do anything but scan your code and hope for the best, because their senior is hassling them about a,b,c, which are far more important. Now that was flawed on their part, and they're doing their job wrong, but you can help them fix that process, if you want to, and it is a good skill to learn. You absolutely should not be avoiding code review, you should be guiding that process in a direction that is in everyone's interest. The world of work is not remotely fair, clear or right - it is very rarely even one of those, but you can make it better yourself by managing upwards and making your requirements and concerns clear at a very early stage. In my opinion the dichotomy of tough but fair/nice but inaccurate feedback is a false one. Most feedback is rushed, muddled, partly correct, partly irrelevant, partly insightful and still useful if you know how to mine it.