u/Lunch-Sure

I’m a 2025 graduate from a tier 2/3-ish college with ~1+ YOE, looking for advice from people a few years ahead of me who have built a strong career in tech.

A little background:

• Did 2 internships in my final year at small startups (<10 people).
• One converted to full-time at ~8 LPA.
• I chose the startup over TCS/Capgemini because I felt I’d get better work and learning.
• Worked there for ~10 months on full-stack development, AI agents, chatbots, etc.
• The company wasn't doing well, so I was laid off along with several others.
• Took me ~2 months to find my next job, during which I was barely getting interviews and honestly started losing hope.

I'm now working at a large service-based MNC on a third-party payroll, at roughly similar compensation.

My current work is mainly Angular to React migration, with some Spring Boot/backend work on the side.

The job is stable, but I'm getting too comfortable.

At the startup, I was constantly building things, figuring stuff out and learning across frontend/backend/AI. Here, the work is much more structured and predictable.

Also, I don't really see this as a place I want to settle into long-term. The current project is expected to end in around a year, after which I could be moved to another project, or potentially face another round of uncertainty. After going through one layoff already, I don't want my career to depend on which project I'm assigned to next.

I'm worried that if I spend the next 2–3 years just doing assigned work, I'll look back and realize I didn't build the skills needed to make a significant career jump.

I'm comfortable with JavaScript/React and the broader JS ecosystem. I know Java reasonably well and have used it for DSA, and I'm comfortable with both frontend and backend. But these months I am mostly prompting AI, with some debugging when needed(was doing same in the earlier company as well). This AI prompting thing also worries me a little.

So I'd really like to hear from people with **3–**5 YOE who are still hands-on engineers and have progressed significantly in their careers.

If you were in my position at ~1 YOE, what would you focus on for the next 2–3 years or maybe next 6 months?

1. Would you go deep into frontend, backend, or aim to become a strong full-stack engineer?
2. Which skills actually compounded for you and helped you make big jumps in responsibility/compensation?
3. If you could go back to 1 YOE, what would you do differently?

I genuinely want to understand what people who are 5–8 years into a successful engineering career did early on that actually paid off.

Would really appreciate some elder-brother/elder-sister advice.