Should I stay at a start up or start applying elsewhere
This is my first cs job, been here over a year now. I’m honestly semi happy here with the work I do.
But recently I’ve not been as happy. The codebase is being overrun by ai generated code from the other engineers. I love taking advantage of ai but when the entire thing is vibe coded I can’t help but to think the maintainability of this thing in another year or so is going to be in shambles. There’s also the case of poor role clarification, I’m supposed to be a “lead” which honestly I understand it’s a bit ridiculous for 1 year experience but regardless it feels like a fake role since he will randomly make another engineer take lead instead, most annoyingly if it’s one of the ones who just vibe code.
The main 2 reasons I’ll want to stay is personally I feel like I have a very good relationship with everyone in my team and the freedom I have is very nice. Remote work, flexible hours and honestly I might end up in a much stricter system in a proper company. But on the other hand if I joined a proper company I feel I would get considerably better mentoring and learn the “trade” a lot better than what I’m doing now which is honestly very “wing it” to say the least.
There’s also the fact we are very close to (hopefully) getting more investment (6-12 months) which I personally find promising not just what I’ve been told.
Boss claims they want to give me higher pay and even shares (as you can expect current pay is wack).
So is it worth staying, am i foolish to expect a big payrise and potential shares, I of course don’t expect anything crazy but the product we are creating as a concept does have a lot of promise and backing.