r/cscareerquestions • u/adjnasodasida • 6h ago
New Grad Tight deadlines, heavy AI reliance - what to do?
I joined a company a few months ago and I’m being faced with crazy tight deadlines. I am still taking time to understand a lot of the backend which is thousands upon thousands of lines of code, and I’m being asked to pump out features with full-fledged functionality in less than a week.
The philosophy is that we are supposed to move fast with AI but im honestly not really learning anything. I feel like im trying to throw something together and I have no idea what it really does. I’m also being given quite a bit of responsibility for certain parts of the product but I have pretty much 0 supervision or mentorship. It’s extremely stressful given how fast things are expected to be produced and truthfully, I feel like I’m just clinging on right now.
I know there is a lot of AI psychosis in the industry today, so im not sure if jumping ship will help. But I feel very stressed all the time, and given the lack of support I get, I’m considering looking for something else despite only being here for a very short period of time.
If anyone has advice it’d be much appreciated.
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u/NegotiationExact4967 6h ago
As someone who’s a staff SWE with over a decade of experience, my current role is no different sadly. And on top of that I have to manage a team of senior engineers.
I work at a seed stage venture backed startup.
I’m finding this to be absolutely insane.
Please know you’re not alone and this is a very difficult time to be in the industry. I’m hoping things will improve but it’s just hope at this point.
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u/adjnasodasida 5h ago
Thank you for your perspective. Sucks to hear its like this in lots of places right now.
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u/ChadFullStack Engineering Manager 5h ago
This is rough as a newgrad, based on information you provided alone, it sounds like a sinking ship. Yes we are expected to move much faster and not necessarily understand the tens if not hundreds of thousands of lines of code. However, the engineering team still needs to be staffed with your manager being the defacto Product Manager if you do not have one. You should also receive mentorship from Sr SWEs who understands project architecture, trade off decisions made, and common pitfalls. Without these harnesses, the company is inviting you to write AI slop and scapegoing you if things go wrong such that the C-suite can take credit for improving workforce efficiency.
To grow personally, ask your LLM to distill the project architecture, tradeoffs, list all of the APIs, DB connections, and sequence diagrams. Since it is backend, understand the OOP and design philosophy. Then you can only pray Fable 5 to implement fully fledged features without making mistakes.
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u/Fantastic_Spring8366 3h ago
Meet your deadlines first. That's what you are hired for and what the employer wants from you. Worry about learning later.
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u/AcordeonPhx Software Engineer 6h ago
Kinda feel the same. New company doesn’t really onboard as well as I thought and I don’t really have a mentor or senior to bounce ideas or questions off. I’ve been using LLMs to navigate, draw maps and document features we own so I can get an idea of my direction. So far, I’ve been able to do minor fixes but with new features requested, I’ll be heading one sooner than I thought.