I am at a legacy telecommunications company (one of the big 3). I currently work on relatively modern tech stack with SpringBoot, Java 21, and Angular 14. I have 2 years of experience as a professional developer and graduated this year.
At this stage of my career, my goal is to become as technically proficient as possible, so that I can have more money and options in the future.
My team consists of many developers that have been at this company their entire careers and that don't want to implement things like automated testing, or CI/CD pipelines. I fear this lack of enthusiasm for engineering growth will stunt my technical abilities, as I am the only one suggesting these kinds of upgrades.
We support an application with ~500,000 monthly users, but I have never had a discussion about building more "scalable" code. I rarely get any feedback on my PRs and our team doesn't have any clear guidance about great vs bad code.
My concern is whether getting better at this job in this role, while helpful to be promoted, may not be pushing me in the most "industry-standard" direction, leaving me behind my peers in technical ability. I worry that without team feedback and focus on "great code", then 3 years from now I am going to vastly under leveled compared to a developer with strong tech leads that have been giving code-reviews that entire span.
Would you recommend I focus on interviewing/job hunting to get into a MAANG company, so that I am surrounded by top-tier talent, or on staying put and using the techniques taught here to individually improve my abilities and our codebase? Or, perhaps there is another option you would recommend.
I would love to hear your thoughts, thanks!
