How to navigate my career working at a company with questionable career growth

Question

This is actually a continuation of this previous question. Time flies :)

I was laid off from Amazon as an SDE 1 and it took me ~1 year to find my current role. I'm very grateful to have a stable job in this economy and learn an in demand tech stack (AWS), but truthfully I don't see this place as a long term fit because

The Good

Coworkers are all nice, WLB is pretty good, and company is somewhat stable (no layoffs at all in the past 4 years)
I only need to come in 1 day a week (Many weeks they say not to come in so it feels like my position is semi remote)
Mentorship is great and tooling is all AWS infra which is a pretty relevant stack. For example, I completed a networking project which I thoroughly enjoyed and felt was a really unique opportunity compared to traditional web dev work

The Questionable

There is no real career matrix or promotion system. There's a tech lead for the team but he/she is the lead most likely because they have been here the longest
Infra and software teams here work in silos and sometimes I find 50% of my day is manual work such as the following
- Uploading files to S3
- Modifying DynamoDB entries
- Creating feature flags in Parameter Store
- Running ECS containers
- Logging into and running commands on EC2 instances
- Note: I actually tried seeing if we could automate this work but the thing is that we don't want to give the application team permission to do these things themselves (especially in PROD). We are essentially the gate keeper
No code review culture here. Everyone pushes straight to master and for deploying to production, we need to raise a change and deploy on release day
Company only hires experienced engineers so there's very little opportunity to mentor anyone new
Manager doesn't have 1:1s with subordinates, not out of maliciosness but most likely because everyone is experienced and feel it's not necessary, especially with no leveling. Upon my request, feedback comes ad-hoc

My question is

Is it worth it to just to try and fight the slow culture here or just do what's necessary since I'm going to leave anyway
1. For example, work to implement code reviews here even though people feel it's not necessary, etc
How long to stay before applying (for context it's already been ~1 year)

Thank you!

anamazonsde · Accepted Answer

I am sure you will get a lot of good suggestions from other Taro members shortly. But I wanted to comment on one thing.

I saw all the issues that you mentioned as a HUGE opportunity for you, you don't need new members to mentor, you can mentor existing members by just enforcing/encouraging the code review culture, and helping ease/automate it.

You could build small tools for your team to automate the tasks that you don't want other team to do, so even though you execute them yourself, it can take seconds instead of minutes/hours.

Regardless for your decision to leave or stay, I would look very positively into these gaps and start investing time into that from now -and may be also involving some like-minded SWEs to participate with you-, leave your touch and signature. Will be a great legacy if you leave, or a huge accomplishment if you decide to stay.

How to navigate my career working at a company with questionable career growth

Discussion