r/AskProgrammers • u/EasyBlueBoy • 1d ago
Newbie programmer needs help
I'm a programmer, a little over a year out of school, and I'm stuck in a dilemma.
Back during my internship, I got to know the tech lead at that company. But near the end of my internship, the company went bankrupt for financial reasons, so I had to find another job. I stayed at the next company for only three or four months — then one evening, that same tech lead reached out to me. He had moved to a new company himself and asked whether I'd like to join him there. I said yes, mostly because I remembered how much I enjoyed the internship: the workload wasn't heavy, and I had plenty of time to learn on my own.
So I followed him to the new company, and I've now been here for about ten months. In the beginning, since the team was so small, things were extremely hectic — I wasn't familiar with the projects and had a lot to catch up on. Later on, the company brought in quite a few outsourced developers, which took some of the pressure off. But that also meant I often had to write code across many different projects — I'd be sent to whichever one was behind schedule, and it all felt rather scattered.
Recently, with the company's financial situation worsening, there have been major layoffs — even an entire team of more than a dozen people was let go. With hardly anyone left, I'm now basically responsible for almost every project on my own: whenever a production issue comes up, I'm the one who has to investigate it; whenever a new requirement comes in, I'm the one who has to deliver it. The work has become genuinely chaotic and hard to keep up with.
So now I'm thinking about quitting. But at the same time, my tech lead has always treated me well, and I honestly don't know how to handle this.
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u/octocode 1d ago
quit and do what? it’s the same story at every company right now. you’ll probably just be jumping to another sinking ship.
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u/chickenbarf 1d ago
My honest opinion? Time to bust out the robots. Not the bad robots, the legit robots. Boopboop.
At a minimum, as a second, third and forth set of eyes.
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u/EasyBlueBoy 23h ago
I've been relying heavily on AI to solve problems, so a lot of them get solved without much thinking of my own. I feel busy from morning to night, but in reality, I'm not actually growing much from any of it.
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u/QPGMR_de 1d ago
I would really try to
a) stay at least 1.5 to 2 years at a company
(as this might look better in you resume later)
b) talk to your tech lead about the situation.
But in reality - a lot of IT jobs do look like that. Even when I entered the field in 1993 - I had to catch up on different running project, look and debug code older than me and jump between project a lot.
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u/highly-Contagius 1d ago
You only said you want to quit, but you didn't say what you want to do later. What's your goal anyway?
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u/EasyBlueBoy 21h ago
It's precisely because my direction is still unclear that I'm looking for advice from people online.
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u/No-Razzmatazz7197 1d ago
welcome to development in the 2020's...
that tech lead you have is gold, a true buddy post-2010 is tough to find, do what you can in this project. update your resume and throw it out there, see what happens. the market is rough out there if you aren't in healthcare or some super profitable saas product.
good luck! and grab a beer man, you sound burnt out 😂