22M here. Decided work for a local startup, and in spite of my title being "software engineer" it's far from what I was expecting it to be:
1. The company is an AI company, and any needs for labeling are my tasks. This means that I may work for 2 months straight doing close to no coding. I mentioned this to my manager, and he told me that it's part of a software engineer's tasks.
2. There's barely any web development. My interview process had me think that this is a company that hires me for my web dev skills, but after a year I only had web development tasks for 4.5 months, and that's pushing it. The rest of the time I'll be creating Python scripts that have a low lifespan, meaning I have no performance or tradeoffs to consider.
3. My lead brought up the fact that I'm using the tag "junior" on my own, because they never assigned it to me. I told him that what I'm currently lacking is technical expertise and as long as I'm lacking in that regard I'll keep referring to myself as junior. I also told him that, outside of technical expertise, I lack a lot of experience (shipping products, building real projects, considering various approaches, be a part of a team of developers - I work solo atm). I also challenged the notion that "tags don't matter" by telling him that just because I don't have the junior tag (for the sake of the argument) doesn't mean that I can produce software that is as good as his. He didn't responded.
Last but not least, he told me that he sees me as more than a code monkey, and that in big corporations (companies that I'd be building software products) I'd feel drained after a year of working there. A bold claim, because I responded with the fact that that's exactly how I feel right now working for a startup. It feels like I'm either at the same skill level as I was before my first job or worse.
I understand that HN is biased towards startups, so I wanted to ask: Am I being unreasonable for expecting that the startup life would be full of technical challenges, or am I holding an unrealistic romantic notion of what a software engineer does working for a startup?
1. The company is an AI company, and any needs for labeling are my tasks. This means that I may work for 2 months straight doing close to no coding. I mentioned this to my manager, and he told me that it's part of a software engineer's tasks.
2. There's barely any web development. My interview process had me think that this is a company that hires me for my web dev skills, but after a year I only had web development tasks for 4.5 months, and that's pushing it. The rest of the time I'll be creating Python scripts that have a low lifespan, meaning I have no performance or tradeoffs to consider.
3. My lead brought up the fact that I'm using the tag "junior" on my own, because they never assigned it to me. I told him that what I'm currently lacking is technical expertise and as long as I'm lacking in that regard I'll keep referring to myself as junior. I also told him that, outside of technical expertise, I lack a lot of experience (shipping products, building real projects, considering various approaches, be a part of a team of developers - I work solo atm). I also challenged the notion that "tags don't matter" by telling him that just because I don't have the junior tag (for the sake of the argument) doesn't mean that I can produce software that is as good as his. He didn't responded.
Last but not least, he told me that he sees me as more than a code monkey, and that in big corporations (companies that I'd be building software products) I'd feel drained after a year of working there. A bold claim, because I responded with the fact that that's exactly how I feel right now working for a startup. It feels like I'm either at the same skill level as I was before my first job or worse.
I understand that HN is biased towards startups, so I wanted to ask: Am I being unreasonable for expecting that the startup life would be full of technical challenges, or am I holding an unrealistic romantic notion of what a software engineer does working for a startup?