Earlier this week my advisor was in an online meetings with the other RAs, I was doing other duties at the time, so I arrived late. He brought up a delay I guess I caused on a previous project (I don’t recall anything that was particularly long, I think he may have been referring to me pointing out an issue with the math he would have preferred to ignore, but that could just be me being catty) and called my code ‘messy’ and said to not use my code, but instead use his vibe-coded script that gave better results (It was incorrect, surprise). Today he yelled at me for not getting some work done and I blew up at him, and recused myself from the project (today was the deadline to submit the paper, so that was kind of a dick move).
Now that I am less angry and thinking more clearly, I can’t help but think that this is a massive break of professional decorum, and breaks my trust in him entirely. I don’t feel that I can really trust him to write proper reviews of my work or be relied upon as a reference.
Am I correct in feeling this way, or am I overreacting?
That person is definitely an asshole and seems to have some beef with you for some reason. That said for optics reasons you probably could have handled that better, not for his sake of course but in such professional settings people are really into “muh decorum” and shit like that.
What you should do is catch him slipping and put a magnifying glass on his own deficiencies and mistakes to other people on the project. Just be warned that might backfire too not sure how the dynamics in your team work, he might have more political leverage than you so it could be you’re fucked no matter what you do, unfortunately that’s just how these things work sometimes, but chances are if he’s an asshole to you he’s probably an asshole to other people as well.