I am ~ 5 months into my entry-level software developer job. I graduated back in April.
Since being employed, I have had few tasks/work to do, and the few things that I have been given I have completed them way ahead of time. My "mentor" consistently ignores my requests for more work and will often straight up ignore me/lie to me on slack. By no means am I looking for spoon feeding or hand holding? But as an entry-level developer, I do need a bit of guidance and help when it comes to picking up something to work on. I can't even seem to find or get assigned some simple debugging issues to kill time with.
For the first 2/2.5 months of work, I was busy doing courses to help prepare myself for the role, and I was reading up on tons of frameworks and I was very motivated. I also spent a lot of time looking through the codebase, in an effort to help bring me up to speed.
At about the 3-month mark, I have become super unmotivated and frustrated because I still have no real work to do and it seems as though everyone is avoiding/ignoring me. I have tried to communicate in a professional way without coming across as needy/annoying/whining. I have pushed for meetings with my supervisor so I could express my desire for more tasks. The supervisor has been consistently coming up with excuses to cancel my meeting requests and blow me off.
I feel as though I am really hurting my career development as a young software engineer and that I am going to regret this whole thing later. Currently, I am still trying to push for more work and tasks at my current job, while I am starting to grind leetcode problems and look for other opportunities on the side. (The last month I was very lazy.... was playing video games and just unmotivated. This made me feel like a real POS and now I'm back to attempting to use this time to be productive).
I want to ask you guys if you think that I should just stick around at this job to get 1 year of experience. (I don't have any other past work experience/intern experience in tech so this is my first real job as a software developer). Right now I feel as though even though I am not getting any work/industry experience at this job, the 1 year of experience will be very valuable and help me with new opportunities. Is this the wrong way of looking at this? Does the 1 year of work experience even matter if I'm not learning/getting much out of it? Should I try and jump ship and get a new job right away? (I found it very difficult to break into the industry and even land this job).
My current plan is to try and stay motivated and grind leetcode problems to help increase my chances at future technical interviews. At the same time, I am going to continue to push/express my desire for more challenging work at my current job position... even though this seems hopeless at this point. Eventually, I will probably go back to working on courses and learning more frameworks and new languages.
I apologize if I am coming across as entitled or cynical or a straight-up cry baby. This is not my intention by posting this. I don't want sympathy, I am just trying to tell it the way it is and get some honest advice!
I have read very similar posts on here, but I am looking to get some additional perspectives and thoughts from you guys.
JobAdvisor:
I'd grind leetcode during the day and look for new jobs. Don't bother waiting for the one-year mark; you might not make it that long.
Whatever is going on with your mentor/supervisor, this current job isn't giving you what you want. The fact that you aren't contributing to the codebase at all means that you are very expendable and perhaps have precarious job security.
If you'd rather try and make things work where you are, you could try having an honest conversation with your boss about how you need more to do. You could suggest parts of the code you'd like to work on. Come up with a list of things you'd like to learn, and ask your boss for help planning how to get there.
Meanwhile, grind, grind, grind. Keep writing code and complete personal projects. Don't let your skills slip - you've got a long career ahead of you and you're right that this is an important time in your development. Good luck.