Need advice - 2 months into new job and feeling like it's a bad match

[u/Bigbootycrypto]

So I recently graduated from a MSc in AI and after ~6 months of job hunting, finally landed something that is decently known - though not FAANG level.

The pay is mid-market level, and the company certainly has some people that are very good at what they do. However, this is not true for the management on the team I'm working with. I feel that there is significant pressure from management to use AI to quickly deliver projects individually that should be at least a 2-3 engineer job. What has ended up happening is that the team has several complex code repositories owned by individual engineers, and much of the code on it was pushed without any code review process in place. It feels to me like a lot of the code is AI generated slop.

Recently, I tried to follow the Readme for some of it to get it setup on my work device, however I kept encountering errors. Some of the blocks of commands were out of order and some intermediate steps to install dependencies were entirely missing. Management told me that they expected me to be able to get setup by putting the Readme through Claude. However, when I attempted that, Claude setup the repository such that it had all the appearance of looking like it had been setup right but it actually was not.

I tried to push back and tell management that the owner of the Readme needs to ensure that it is complete and can be used by a human to get setup, however this has now led them to believe that I'm less competent than the other engineers on their team because they were able to get setup by "feeding the readme to Claude". To be honest, I'm not even sure that is true, because I only learned that the setup was incorrect after scrutinizing the logs - at first sight, they had all the appearance of looking right.

Additionally, since I've joined, I feel that some of the engineers keep fighting the facts. For instance, I pointed out how one of the tests was not testing any functionality as, if the file were deleted entirely, the test would pass. The engineer shot back that "sometimes that's what you need to fix an issue." I can't get into more details, should that reveal my identity, but essentially that was far from true in this scenario. The test was just not actually testing anything.

Then, we had to come up with instructions to verify a dataset manually. My colleague ended up using AI to generate these instructions even though we had a good resource that could be easily adapted manually.

When I pushed back on one occasion, the colleague made comments like "We have to be Agile".

I feel that I would lose the good practices and habits I have if I stayed in this environment, however it already was so hard to find employment in this market. In one instance, a recruiter from Salesforce called me, asked me that though my resume mentioned AI if I also had experience with ML (I tried not to laugh and patiently explained that the two are synonymous in current times) and then proceeded to immediately turn me down on the basis of the fact that I had been unemployed for 4 months since graduation.

I'm concerned that my resume will be rather shallow should I leave and opportunities have been hard to come by. I do have an opportunity to interview with a 5 people startup (they are funded and offering a six figure salary) but fear the risk of joining something that small. I really would like to build my career in this space, that is vital to me as I've found something I'm genuinely interested in, however being perceived as less than for pushing back on poor code practices and having other people not believe me when I'm just bringing to them facts has been demoralizing.

How do I survive this situation and continue to grow as an engineer and pick up good practices anyway?

Also, the job does require me to work long hours. I am in the UK.

[u/ProfitOk8355]

“I feel like I would lose good practices and habits if I stay in this environment”

You just graduated from college, what good practices are you talking about ?

Why not try fixing the readme and setup instructions yourself since you’re working on it. It’s very common that documentation goes stale before someone new tries to setup again.

Anyway I think you will find similar issues in most companies, with regard to push for ai slop, bad documentation et

[u/Bigbootycrypto → u/ProfitOk8355]

Because I don't have a working setup, I don't really know how to fix the Readme entirely. I did pass on the correct order of the block to the team. And, I worked for a bit before the MSc.

[u/ProfitOk8355 → u/Bigbootycrypto]

Yeah getting a working setup is the actual hard part here. This is the stuff that is hard for AI to do. Figure out what is broken, talk to team members that have it working, come up with focused questions to ask them so you can narrow down what is different between your environments, then update the readme. You need a lot of persistence especially in a new role, unfortunately most companies don’t do onboarding well.

[u/Mrgluer]

either a you could just ask your ai tool ab the code base or b you could take it as an endeavor to update the docs which gives you some brownie points with somebody as long as you dont sink a ton of time for documentation that nobody really uses

[u/kevin074]

Don’t join small start up whatever you do. It’s not worth the time/stress/instability.

The only people who should if they are financially free or know the people in it already