Don’t confuse a bad work environment with not liking or being suitable for your job.

If you liked programming, do your work in the way that made you originally liked programming. People will put pressure on you to just “do things”. Don’t. Ensure you start understanding, slowly get more insight into what’s going on. Ask the people around you any and all questions you need to get more understanding. Allow yourself to learn. That is the only way to start feeling in control, and the only way to become ‘more senior’.

That being said. If you want to move on, there’s no harm, and no shame. Just do it because you’ll be doing something you know you will like better.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

Tldr; take offer, don’t quit engineering yet, you are fine

Don’t quit engineering if you enjoy it. If you have better offer and the current ship is leaky as fuck => jump the ship. Saving the leaky ships should be very profitable if it is not => you are being heavily exploited.

I jumped the ship thrice. And one time accepted a lower payed position, just because I was quite burnout.

On the topic not using the progress and not understanding the Intenals. Understanding internal will not make you senior. Understanding what you can apply that you already know can make you senior. I remember being in a situation like yours. I thought I didn’t know Jack, but then on a newplace I seen people who were running around like a headless chickens on crack. This has given me a good understanding about what knowledge is and that applicable knowledge is the key.

Dude.

1. Stop comparing yourself to your heroic peers. You know you’re not lying about your rich ‘hustle’ life (or lack), but you don’t know they aren’t.

2. Do all the work but then get the downtime. Don’t try to do too much too soon.

3. Decide for you in all things. If you’re gonna do the time, you pick the crime, to borrow a phrase.

4. Don’t lose heart. Incremental progress takes a long time. Pick a quick task to stay engaged, but realize sometimes that task is ‘sleep properly’.

That’s all I got.

You have to do what’s best for yourself and your situation.

I was a systems administrator for a decade or so and I reached a turning point… I had a bad experience, was burning out, and I had the opportunity to take a new sysadmin gig at a credit union, or take a step down to a support role, that paid more, with less responsibility, and had IPO shares…

My kid was getting ready for college, so option 1 positioned me well if I needed to load up student loans. Option 2 maybe made it so we wouldn’t need student loans.

I went with option 2. Less stress, less responsibility, more pay, paid for kids college in cash, now through a series of IPOs and acquisitions, I’m working for a VERY large tech company.

Does “not being an engineer” look right for you? Quite possibly.

I haven’t used big 0 or algorithms in my 15 years of professional coding. It’s just not important unless you work for a Google and even then you’d have support.

I personally work for more than 20 years as dev and really hate to see myself as senior. I think I am more of a Veteran. I only have more practice and survived more projects. What I am trying to say is, give yourself time. Nobody starts out and knows everything. And even if you have experience, there is always a bigger fish. Simply because the topics are too complex to know them all.

Almost all what is going on today in commercial development is based on knowing frameworks and existing libraries and is far from engineering. I am working in that 19 years and also feel that am not a true engineer, at least at my job. Yes, I developed my own UI client framework, but who know it, who need it except my company… I am not in the 5% of top world engineers. And you know what I think, I do not care. Do f#$*k off, commercial development. I have hobbies, I learn languages that I like and writing code just for fun, solving problems on codewars. I believe that true thech like C and freebsd, emacs and some other not popular in commercial development programming languages is my way. And yes, I am earning money at my job, but at the same time, as I said, I tell all these overhyped shit “do f#@&k off” and going my own way. That’s my life. Have a luck, bro. Find your own path.

I am called a srnior developer and I haven’t done a project in my spare time in many years. Not because I don’t want to, but because I do enough of that at work and I lack the energy. Most people I know are in the same boat.

I used to enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time, but in two years I’ve opened the IDE on my personal machine no more than twice.

This is why I have never taken on programming as a profession. I earn more than I would ever make as a developer (even a very senior developer) leveraging my (average) programming skills to produce a personal suite of software tools and scripts that means I can do my chosen profession better, faster and with less effort than any of my colleagues or competitors. I have also developed small apps on a private/ personal basis that I have then sold to my employer for wider use in the company.

And I still enjoy programming as a hobby as much as I ever have. Don’t underestimate how much being able to program at even an average level can boost a career in another field.

From your description, my view is limited, there is no correct solution. Any choice is viable and fine, and any decision you make will be due to the reasons you chose with.

You didn’t disclose what the alternative opportunity and field is, and also not your view on the field and you in it. So it’s difficult to assess and put into relation.

You didn’t disclose what you did before work, but two years is not that much experience for an engineer. Especially if it is not a particularly nourishing environment. You gain such expertise through experience and exposure over time. Depending on the project and environment it’s also not enough to fully understand and intuitively know a big project.

At my workplace we separate role from [personal] development level. As a developer one’s role may be developer or lead developer. The development stages are Trainee, Junior, Professional, Senior. If you can work on tasks mostly self-reliant (asking and collaborating is still open of course; knowing when to ask is a skill too) and can put tasks and work into context, you are a Professional. A Senior can support and guide the team. It is perfectly fine to settle for Professional.

Not being exceptional is not a good reason to quit. If you work and bring value, that’s still value. Don’t decide whether you are valuable or good enough for others. (This leaves out the question of what it means for yourself of course. Tackle those questions individually.)

You say you get your work done. Continuing to do that at a Professional Developer rather than Senior level is fine. You still bring value.

I want to know if that’s what it sounds like to people who’ve seen that before. If you were in my position, would you walk away and just be a hobbyist programmer or stick it out and hope to be a mediocre engineer one day?

I really can’t answer that specifically.

You said your team environment is not the best. I assume you don’t do retrospectives or personal feedback. Is feedback something you could ask [of some of] your team members, lead, or seniors? (Take care not to poison your question for open feedback with your negative assumptions of yourself and your work.)

Where would you like to be? Separating what you think is expected of you from your expectation and view of yourself and from what you enjoyed and where you think you would feel comfortable settling, how would you lay those out?

Have you considered switching project or employer? You have only seen and experienced that place. A different work environment could be very different - even in the same field.

You should go into underwater welding.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CKKjs7PtHZo

Being mediocre is fine. And you can’t expect to feel competent after 2 years, especially if you’re not in a supportive environment. Maybe 5 years. It took me muuuch longer than 5… This stuff is hard, don’t expect to master it quickly.

deleted by creator

First of all if you solve problems that means you know enough of the subject to reason out the solution, it may not be perfect but very few solutions are.

I have been working on legacy code and maintaining old c++ code for a decade (200.000 loc) and most of the time I had to spend days debugging and reading code just to understand enough to get a possible solution, and then I still end up writing a solution that breaks in a different corner case that I never could have imagined.

So yes most of the time you feel like you don’t know anything, but over time you end up knowing a lot of how that codebase works. And after two years you must have picked up something about what you are working on.

Then you have those programming language genius colleagues, that know all the tips and tricks of a language, I use them to get ideas on solutions, because they always have an opinion on what is the “right” way of doing stuff.

That’s just my 2 cents.