How to survive a dysfunctional and dying organization as a medior dev?
Posted by QuantumQuack0@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 4 comments
The obvious answer would be "leave ASAP", I guess, but (1) I do like (most) of the people here, (2) I'm in Europe and have 2 calendar months mandatory notice, (3)... I'm a bit at a loss what to do career-wise.
So, this company is not doing well. We have a bad track record of taking on way too many projects, and after trimming down a lot this year, it's still too many. We're heavily understaffed and have no hiring budget. But the biggest problem is: our current product was architected and designed by a relatively small amount of people with short communication lines, and this company never learned how to scale and how to do proper system architecture.
We sell hardware products that contain embedded software, and provide "driver" software and some application library on top. Those last two have historically been just an afterthought. No architecture, no one in the company who really cared, just one team (us) doing our best to make "something".
We're now somehow in the middle of the "next generation product line" project, and I can find barely any system architecture. And people are already diving head-first into hardware implementation. And here's my challenge: with how understaffed we are, this team seems to be eyeing me as the person to do the software architecture.
I have roughly 3.5 YoE in this role. My previous role was "a bit of everything" (optical/electrical/fpga/software) at a very early startup. I have a physics background. I know python really well, picked up some system engineering in my previous job, and people generally like my work, but otherwise I feel horrifically underqualified.
How do I not make this a complete disaster and burn bridges? I tried to bring up my doubts and was mostly met with incredulous stares and an attitude of "you've been working here for 3.5 years, you know plenty!" I mean, I have been working here for that time, yeah, but as a result of the software team being left to their own devices I have learned very little.
Any words of advice? Words of encouragement or tough love?
SrDevMX@reddit
Don’t expect the design and architecture to be perfect at your first try. It’s a long simmering process where you start somewhere and create a baseline and then continuously review and revisit to promote the what it worked like best parts, best practices to form part of the architecture’s next version.
I like to do detailed walkthrough of the ideas behind the architecture and explaining to the team the reasons *why* the different parts are there and why the way they are. I like to think that there is no *owner* and anybody in the team can criticize it constructively and bring their improvements and contributions PRs, like in the open source world.
somerandomlogic@reddit
Market job for devs are now in bad shape to be honest. I thing important skill in this env is practice interviewing, it's way better to learn it now when you have job, and maybe you finally find something better. If not in case of layoff you will be ready
scandii@reddit
I mean, it is a learning opportunity. as long as they're willing to foot the bill for you learning you're gucci. also many people are eyeing senior after 4 years - you're selling yourself short.
grimr5@reddit
Don’t leave until you have a new job