Senior Engineer won't review PRs
Mostly just venting. I know the answer is probably that I need to pester him more, but theres only so much I can do without being an asshole.
Edit: A lot of you have suggested I break the PRs up into several smaller ones, which I appreciate and think I'm going to do. Don't wanna get too defensive because I should have known, but I wish he would've given me some indication of this over the last half year, especially since he's well aware of how green I am with best-practices.
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I'm an entry level SWE on a small team of 5 people. That includes my non-technical manager and an electrical engineer who doesn't code, so really there's only 3 of us. 1 very experienced senior engineer and 2 (including me) recent graduates.
In the past 6ish months, I've "completed" 3 projects on legacy apps. Each consisted of an initial user request and various OOP improvements over several repos (main application + data access layer). I've made 7 pull requests, and none of them have been merged. He requested some changes on 2 of them a month ago, but that's it. 5 of them were created in FEBRUARY.
The other recent grad seemingly has no trouble getting his stuff reviewed. It seems to me like a lot of what he does are smaller bug fixes (maybe editing a couple of files) and my changes are much larger in scope (10 to 20 files in the main applications).
As the only sr engineer who touches this giant codebase, I'm sure he constantly has a ton on his plate and I'm sympathetic to that. But he is the only blocker on this stuff and it makes me look bad when I have to explain to users (internal customers) that it's still in review. Recently got asked about the progress on one of these and I messaged him to ask if I should give some time table, but he ignored that message for 4 hours. I got antsy and emailed the user that the changes are still in review and I can't yet say when it'll be deployed. Sr engineer chewed me out for "not looping him in".
This stresses me out so much. I dread having to interact with him. I can't go to my boss about this because then I'm overreacting and insubordinate. Honestly I probably am overreacting, but I ruminate on this so much and don't stop stressing when I get home.
Is this a normal first-job experience? Am I overreacting? Is there any way I can deal with this without being confrontational?