I’m not sure what to do in this position
Posted by radioactiveflamingos@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 6 comments
Horribly stagnated and in a bad spot in my career
I'm in a rough spot at the moment with my career outlook currently and starting to lose hope. I have about 3 YOE and I've been stuck at a dead end CRUD engineering role at my current company.
For context, my whole org was formed after an executive from company A migrated over to my current company, B, as well as bringing along essentially half their team members. The ideology and work (which was building out a PaaS solution for enterprise API gateway management) was carried over and adapted over to work with the infrastructure existing in my current company. During this transition period, I really had no say in important design or architectural decision and just followed along observing / learning as much as I can.
About 2 years into the team, we've gotten into a more steady position and GA'd our product which has gotten decent adoption within my company. During these two years, I regrettably took the backseat and just operated as a feature engineer for the time being. I couldn't figure out new solutions or features to add to the platform (either due to a lack of product knowledge or just my general intelligence) and really lost out on critical experience designing systems and proposing ADRs.
I believe it's my fault for not being proactive about this, but I've mentioned this on occasion to my manager but he provided me no actionable advice or avenues to get this kind of experience. He actively secludes me and other engineers around my level in leadership meetings where I believe most of these discussions go on.
Currently now, our work has slowed down and I'm really worried about layoffs as we're not a money making team within the company and lots of recent churn in leadership. But, even more concerning is just how behind I feel to literally everyone. I've been desperately interviewing and applying externally and internally, but keep falling short because of the lack of leadership and design experience from my current experience so far and just in general struggling to get offers in this job economy.
I've been at the job hunt for almost 8 months now and I'm essentially rotting away as an engineer by staying here. Is there anyway to salvage this at this point? Everyday feels like one more tick to a slow time bomb and I'm genuinely scared.
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Freerrz@reddit
I’d argue most places you won’t be making many design decisions with minimal YOE. Even still, most places you work have “their process” and they stick to it. For instance, with 5-6 YOE I have worked for 3 companies and I still haven’t come across highly scalable, async required, or unique work. The best thing you can do is experience different environments in different jobs (which you are taking the right steps to do).
How time consuming is your work really? If you find your work isn’t intensive, build an app during the downtime to learn. If that’s not the case then take time to slowly and incrementally do it outside of work (this not only allows you to learn what you want, but to actually maintain ownership as well). The latter is what I started doing and I’m finding I’m learning so much more and becoming so much better now because of it, because like you, I felt I was stagnant working for the companies I was.
kobbled@reddit
There's no need to panic. At 3 YOE, I would be extremely surprised if you were making many architectural/platform decisions. 3 years is nothing in the long run. I really don't think you're as behind as you feel you are. There's people that stay in that position for 10+ years, none the wiser. It's good that you've identified a desire to start developing these skills, and it's definitely not the end of the world that you haven't started yet. I would recommend having a 1:1 conversation with one of those engineers who's doing what you want to do, and explicitly ask for advice on how to develop in that direction.
I don't know the dynamic between you and your manager, but if you ask for their help with developing those skills as well, they might be able to point you in the right direction and keep you in mind when an opportunity comes up.
mechkbfan@reddit
Might need to apply for lower positions that don't require leadership?
3 years is early. Pending a few factors but generally that's still junior to me, even with a degree or similar.
chikamakaleyley@reddit
brother you've already taken the right steps it's just unfortunate that there's not a lot of options currently w 3 YOE under your belt.
honestly it just sounds like you have a shitty manager and that's unfortunate because - they should be supportive of your career growth. I was gonna mention looking for another team, but looks like you've been trying that as well
but still, 8 months isn't unheard of - though it sounds like you are in fact getting interviews but you continue to fall short, so i wonder if this is a case where you just aren't improving interview to interview, or - you have improved consistently, you just can't make it to the offer?
shifty_lifty_doodah@reddit
Your career just starting. Dont worry. Keep going