Episode 477: Four months and I already hate my job and grumpy and fuzzy

<p>In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:</p>

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<li>
<p>Hey guys,</p>

<p>I have been working for four months at my job and I already don’t like it.</p>

<p>This is my first job out of college and I work as a C# backend engineer for a small B2B SaaS company. I really think this company is a dead end. There is a lot of technical debt and antipatterns and we have no automated testing whatsoever. Most of our time is spent manually debugging but no one wants to refactor.</p>

<p>I’m already thinking about working somewhere else. However, it took me a while to get this job, and I don’t think the market has gotten any better since. I’m trying to decide whether I should focus on applying to jobs again or if I should work on a bunch of side projects and open source to stand out better. On one hand, I can learn new technologies on my own to make me stand out for my next job, but on the other hand,
I feel like as long as I stay at this company I am wasting time, since I’m not learning from my job. I want to switch to more distributed backend engineering in Java anyways, but I’m not sure how to go about it.</p>
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<li>
<p>Listener Ghani asks,</p>

<p>“I’m a mid-level software engineer who has trouble communicating with my engineering manager and product manager when there is unclear or missing information about an assignment/story/project.</p>

<p>They answer with hostile/dismissive tone/non-answer (e.g it’s on the jira-card, epic, etc). They course correct when they have the information later, harshly</p>

<p>my impressions were</p>

<ul>
<li>they don’t have the information at the time</li>
<li>they expect engineers to make decision</li>
<li>they expect engineers to know something they don’t (e.g architecture, infrastructure, past decision, plans, etc)</li>
</ul>

<p>I really want to look for where we can have a safe exchange of information. How can I do this?</p>
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</ol>