
Ask HN: How to improve skills in a bad job situation? - pony_tapes
I&#x27;ve been working my first job as a software engineer for a year and a half. We&#x27;re a very small team serving a niche industry.<p>We&#x27;re in the process of rewriting everything on AWS. The rewrite is led by some consultants who aren&#x27;t very team-oriented. They don&#x27;t care about the customers (us) and tend to give us some incomplete solutions. All of their design takes place in a vacuum.<p>They pass ownership to my team with hardly any documentation. They use us as guinea pigs for whatever new AWS product they want to try and it leads to a lot of problems. We fix all the bugs and deal with their design decisions. I&#x27;m inexperienced at software, but it seems their solutions are overly complicated and just bad. When we come to them with problems, they are dismissive and disrespectful and act like they have no time to help since they already delivered on their part.<p>They have created a lot of toxicity for our team. In my time here, we&#x27;ve lost talented engineers, project managers, designers, and DBAs.<p>Despite all of this, my fellow engineers have been incredibly helpful to me while I learn this new industry. I’ve been exposed to a ton and learned so much. I was hired to work on the frontend but I’ve spent much of my time working on the backend and sometimes doing DBA tasks.<p>I&#x27;m just afraid that I&#x27;m learning some bad habits. Our code reviews aren&#x27;t actually code reviews. I&#x27;ve asked for feedback on my code before but everybody is either too busy or just doesn&#x27;t care. We hardly do any testing, so I don&#x27;t know how to test my code.<p>I don&#x27;t want to take these bad habits to the next job. I spend my free time learning and answering some of my questions, but I feel as though I&#x27;m missing out on some good mentorship at a crucial point in my career.<p>I&#x27;ve been applying to new jobs but this year is especially hard for somebody with my experience level. Is there anyway to overcome these issues without leaving my job?
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sharemywin
Look on the bright side your getting exposed to all the latest AWS products.

Study up on youtube and internet tutorials on unit testing for your language
platform. Then start adding some when you have free time.

