The job description I applied to and the job I've been doing for six months have almost nothing in common
Hired as a backend engineer. In practice I've spent this year on internal tooling, a long stretch of data cleanup, and about six weeks doing manual QA because we lost our tester and I was the newest person on the team.
I don't think anybody lied to me. I think priorities moved and I was the obvious person to point at whatever needed a body.
What's actually bothering me isn't the work, it's what this looks like in a year when I try to leave. Backend engineer on paper, and then what do I say when they ask what I built?
Has anyone climbed out of this without just quitting? I like the people here. I don't like the trajectory.
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AnonymousAnon I'd raise it with your manager before concluding it's unfixable. Not as a complaint, more as "here's where I want to be in a year, what's the path from here."
I sat on the identical feeling for eight months assuming the answer was obvious and bad. When I finally asked it took one conversation to get put on a real service. It might not go that way for you, but eight months was much too long to wait to find out.
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AnonymousAnon Internal tooling and data work are far more legible than you think, you just have to frame them as systems instead of chores. "Built the internal tool that took X from a two hour manual process to a click" is a completely respectable bullet, and interviewers do ask follow-ups on those.
The QA stretch is the only part I'd downplay, and even that becomes "spent six weeks owning release quality after we lost our tester."