Startup Culture
This is my first post ever and I’ll keep it pretty brief. I am a CS major at a non target school and I currently work as a SWE intern at a stealth startup. This time last year I was dreaming of working at a startup as I would love to eventually have my own thing. But I have a few issues and since I don’t have much experience, I can’t compare my situation with almost anything else. So I am looking for advice and other perspectives
My issues are in the day to day. It feels like my entire team just depends on the code AI generates. All I do is prompt engineering. I get to build really cool things but the expectations are that because of AI I am able to perform at a similar level as our founding engineers with almost a decade of experience pre-AI. And a side effect of the demand is that I just work constantly, for 10-12 hours a day. There is no real like mentorship, I’m kind of just thrown to the wolves. While my friends at more established companies join intern programs that are extremely dedicated towards the development of the interns and their career. It just feels like because I am moving at such a fast pace everyday, it is hard to retain the information I am learning and I ultimately feel that my friends who may not work on the coolest projects still get the best learning experience.
For people with more experience than myself who work at either a startup or a larger company. Is it normal to just push a ridiculous amount of code out every week? (I’ve seen 15k diff PRs a handful of times) is this just how SWE is nowadays across the market, where we just now have to trust AI to write our code? It’s not like I was guided into how to write production code outside of my university classes. If I was told to do an entire project without AI I would be lost. With AI I can get almost any project done within 2 weeks. What other realistic options do I have? I want to start grinding leetcode again so I can get ready for job searching elsewhere but I am working so much that when I get home around 7:30pm I have to get ready for bed to be in the office by 7:30 am which means almost no time or energy to prepare.
Been with this company for 6 months now and I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of what my day to day looks like. The people I work with are great and extremely smart, I just wish that I felt as though I was learning. Which is hard to feel when I’m building so fast.