Feeling lost into new role 3 months in, need advice
I recently moved out of a 3 year research position for the industry. Given that it gets harder and harder to land a job in the industry, I decided to pivot outside the safety net of the research centre. Ultimately, after many ghosts, failed screening and final rounds, I got an offer after 5 rounds at a pre revenue startup, with a severely low offer, that got me questioning my competencies completely.
3 months in, the ride has been much more fast paced than I expected. When I onboarded, I was asked to start contributing from week 2, and was pointed out to an ocean of outdated Confluence pages, full of AI generated content (all words and zero talking). Not enough time to get knowledgeable about the codebase, nor the product itself.
I'm full of anxiety, imposter syndrome and constantly stressed. The development team is small (5 guys). The fellow developers, apart from the head, have been absorbed by internships through their degrees.
The two guys use Claude for everything, from programming to documentation. I am tired of seeing em dashes (—) everywhere. PRs are long, with tons of modifications and thousands of changed lines. I am told to not spend more than an hour at each PR. Yet, with so many changes, I find it completely overwhelming. One guy uses Claude for code reviews, which end with long, AI comments that are full of complex, nitpicky issues that are, to my knowledge, unlikely to be spotted and formatted within such a small timeframe (no way you spot a potential memory leak or that complex dataframe operation will result in errors in a hour, without consulting an LLM, all written in perfect English with em-dashes). The other day, I was given to review a 40 page document, which was full of AI slop. Yet, I provide feedback and correct things, especially in the theoretical side, that AI can't catch and it slips through into the product without the development team noticing (no specialization degrees after all). It's either me who spots something due to my education and research experience (e.g. this change in your code causes data leakage) or I get asked for my input and how to guide things (even though we have a team leader).
The rest of developers work overtime constatly and on weekends to keep up with the sprints and everything. It just feels that I cannot keep up on knowing what gets written, merged and documented. The pressure on sprints and delivery feels very real. Instead of taking the time on an implementation, the vibe is "we gave this 5 story points, it must be done by tomorrow". The founders bombard everyone with papers to read to stay up to date with the competition, and also actively say to spend our free time providing ideas and brainstorming for next directions.
Then Claude does the work, nobody has time to review it properly, gets merged into the development branch, and then who cares, move on to the next story until you find implementation errors. This whole thing with AI is resulting in zero ownership and accountability. How can someone deliver thousands of lines of code in two days, when he can't even write a line without it or remember what the solution in his own PR was? The founders are completely aware of all this situation, as well as the team leader.
In my mind I have the following choices:
- Given the market situation, swallow the pill, work normal hours just by doing the minimum work needed (Im not paid high enough to work extra hours and weekends) and pivot when needed
- Grind 100% on it so that I can negotiate a better salary in the future within the company, or pivot somewhere else when a better offer comes
I am grateful to any career advice on more experience people on how I can get the most out of this situation. I am just a guy looking for some work life balance, without having to work all day and night for peanuts. This feels so unexpected compared to my previous employment, and I cannot understand whether it's me who's at fault, the company's culture and practices or just how the market works atm.