Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

I am a fresh graduate data engineer working at a small company in the oil and drilling industry.

I was hired 6 months ago as a freelance data engineer, and after proving myself through my work quality, I am now essentially functioning as a tech lead, with full responsibility and ownership of designing, implementing, and hiring for the projects I'm assigned.

Our company is not a tech company, so I only have a couple of tech-oriented colleagues, and I barely interact with them. Now I directly report to the director of the company, who in all senses is awesome, with 40+ years of combined experience in some of the biggest oil and drilling companies globally.

However, I have some strong FOMO about not being able to learn much technical stuff from my peers or seniors. I am trying my best to learn and pick things up on my own, learning design principles, getting code reviews from chatGPT, etc. But even then, I'm afraid I am not producing the software to the highest standards of the industry since we don't have any rigorous cross-checking, and might be missing out on a lot of learning.

Can someone who has been in positions similar to these please guide me?

> If "technical stuff" is your primary interest, you should probably consider changing jobs.

This 100%. It seems that you're doing things proficiently enough to keep your job, but just want to improve your capabilities as a coder. It's going to be difficult without a proper structure or mentors around you. So you've to make a decision whether you'd prefer to stick with the role and get slowly better over time using blog posts and AI reviews, or jump in the deep end and get another role in a more tech industry aligned company. And if you decide to jump to another role, just be aware that you're going to spend 3 to 6 months panicking about whether you're in over you head, and probably won't get "comfortable" in the role for a year.

It sounds like you are doing better than many in corporate jobs; you are being proactive. ChatGPT is quite valuable here, as is studying.

Where in the world are you? That determines your options.

"AI reviews" is actually a really interesting use-case that I hadn't considered-- but makes so much sense. I feel like it might be good to use Cursor or another AI assistant just for the purpose of suggesting improvements rather than a way to code quicker.

Getting thrown into the deep end is awesome. This is a great opportunity to apply things you can learn. Keep studying and reading, ultimately solving problems even not perfectly you will learn a lot.