As a Junior ‘SWE’ I feel cheated by my employer
This is about AI, but not in the way that you think.
Been working full time out of uni for just over a year now. Big company, working on a big AI product. I was promised software engineering - after all I was a software engineer by name. But piece but piece that facade has fallen away, until now at the one year mark I feel that I have fallen behind in terms of skill and knowledge relative to my peers.
Let me explain. My team works on the prompt. Yes, the prompt. We don’t engineer. Sure, (if we’re lucky) we write code that decides how the prompt gets built. In what order the words appear. But that’s it. At the end of the day, all of the work I’ve done in the past year has amounted to ‘the prompt
looks a bit different now.’ It’s a joke. A year of
my career - the first year, no less - wasted. i feel like bit by bit the promise of interesting work has fallen away beneath me to reveal a void of empty drudgery, to last for years and years more if I stay here.
Obviously the answer is to change jobs. But I dread the question - ‘what is the most difficult technical question you’ve solved?’ Because I truly, honestly, do not have a good answer. I spend all day solving problems, but not deep technical ones, no no, not at all. Instead I chase people on Slack, rummaging for requirements, navigating the bureaucratic shitshow that is the internals of my company. I am more of a product manager than an engineer at this point. And so I spend a day, busy, and I look back at it with nothing to show. I am wasting away here. I am realising now, I am not an engineer. It feels fraudulent to put that title on my resume. And the ‘engineering’ that we do is, yes of course, outsourced to the latest LLM Github Copilot has to offer. There is no thinking here.
All this is to say, I am lost. I know what I have going for me. It is a big name to put on a CV. And I work on a massive enterprise product. But it is the nature of the work, and thus the nature of my employed identity, which feels borderline fraudulent. I am scared I am becoming irrelevant. I am scared that in an interview, I will be found out. It is probably not too late to change course, and I would love any advice on what that might entail. Anything would be dandy.
Yours,
A frustrated and burnt out junior SWE