Six months as the only developer at a non-tech company. What I'm doing to not quietly rot.
Manufacturing company, about forty people, and I am the entire technology department. I maintain an internal inventory app someone built in 2019 and I add whatever operations asks for next. No code review, no standup, no senior looking over my shoulder. Nobody in the building could tell you whether I wrote something decent or something horrifying.
The pay is fine and my manager is genuinely kind. The fear is that in two years I'll interview somewhere real and find out I repeated my first six months four times.
What's helped so far:
- I review my own PRs, but with a delay. I open one, leave it overnight, and read it the next morning like a stranger wrote it. Catches far more than reading it immediately ever did.
- Every couple of weeks I read through an open-source repo in our stack. Not to contribute, just to see what normal looks like when a competent person writes it.
- I write down every decision and the reason for it, since there's nobody here to argue with me. About half look wrong a month later, and that half is the useful part.
All of which is still me grading my own homework. If you've worked solo: how did you keep your standards honest, and how rough was the landing when you finally joined a real team?
5 comments
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AnonymousAnon One thing that helped during my own solo stretch: I started opening small PRs on tiny open-source utility libraries, not big projects, ones where maintainers are patient with newcomers. Getting genuine "this won't scale because X" feedback from a stranger who owes you nothing is a different kind of signal than reading code alone. Doesn't replace a real team, but it's the closest thing to actual review you can get without one.
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AnonymousAnon Being the only dev somewhere is such a specific kind of pressure — no one to sanity check a decision with, but also nobody to blame it on either. Curious what you're doing to stay sharp technically, since that's usually the first thing that slips when there's no team pushing you.
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AnonymousAnon The point above about design disagreements is the one I'd prepare for specifically.
Coming off two years alone, my instinct whenever someone questioned my approach was to assume I'd been caught out, so I'd fold instantly and rewrite it their way. Took me a long time to work out that a senior pushing back is often just thinking out loud, and half the time they expect you to push back too.
Your habit of writing down decisions and the reasons for them is genuinely good preparation for that. You'll have the reasoning ready to say out loud instead of trying to reconstruct it under pressure.
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AnonymousAnon The overnight delay before reviewing your own PR is a great trick and I'm stealing it.
One thing I'd add: try to find a single outside reader. Not a mentor, nothing formal — one person from a community who'll look at one PR a month and tell you honestly what they think. Even that tiny amount of outside signal gives you a reference point that isn't just your own judgement, which is the actual gap when you're solo.
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AnonymousAnon Four years solo at a logistics company before I moved to a real team, so this hits close.
The landing was fine technically. Honestly my fundamentals were better than a few people who'd spent those years on teams, because nothing was ever hidden from me and I had to understand every layer myself.
What I was completely unprepared for was the social half of the job. Design discussions where three competent people disagree and nobody's obviously wrong. Having my work questioned in public by someone who wasn't being unkind about it. Waiting four days on a review instead of just merging. That's the muscle you genuinely cannot build alone, and it took me a good six months.