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

Just use AI, it's pointless waiting for 'seniors' who don't even have time for you.

You will either do well or not, from the company's perspective. I don't think that's what's most important, really, it's just a job. My main advice would be to look out for yourself. This sounds like it could get very stressful, and it sounds like the company might not be fully aware of what it's doing. You might end up making a big mistake, or a series of small ones that snowball into a big problem further down the road. That's all fine, they threw you into the deep end of the lake, so they can own the failures - but you still get to take credit for the successes.

There's no way not to learn from this, and there's things you can learn here that you wouldn't learn from years of being in a regular team. So just as you're missing out on valuable experiences here, you'll also be missing out on valuable experience if you change jobs.

The interesting part of a career is also all the non-technical people we meet, and if you're learning from them, that's also good. Maybe this road will take you somewhere more interesting than spending a lot of time on code reviews.

(PS: If this is actually in oil, make sure you're getting paid well.)

That might be a blessing in disguise to not pick up the bad habits from IT depts of large corporations: spending more time playing with your tooling than solving the company's problem, being uninterested in understanding the business of the company, massively over-engineering and under-delivering.

It might be a bit early for you, but resources like this would help you on your career later on: https://staffeng.com/

“Software standards” come and go, changing relatively quickly, so don’t sweat it too much. You will learn from mistakes, and that’s ok (for me, dunno for your employer :P)

> 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,

I wouldn't worry about this too much. As long as what you're doing seems to vaguely match whatever information about best practices you can find online, you're probably good. As long as you're not inventing your own security tech, using floating point values for financial data or reusing feature flags in a high frequency trading scenario, any bad decisions made along the way probably won't be catastrophic and are more likely to be learning experiences.

More eyes on code is a good thing, but can go too far where a person is cargo culting their beliefs and subjective experience as objective things, leading you to learn the wrong stuff, or at least to a degree where you have an irrational attachment to some practices (e.g. some people always lean towards EAV in DB design, even though that practice has a time and place, same for microservices vs monoliths vs modular monoliths etc.).

> ...and might be missing out on a lot of learning.

This is probably what you should focus on. See if you can attend industry events, watch some talks done by people who've been in the industry for a long time, there's actually lots of nice stuff on YouTube that's not just advertisement for the latest technology or practice. Here's some people whose content I enjoy:

  Dylan Beattie
  Venkat Subramaniam
  Kevlin Henney

Maybe look at some of the better received books. Here's a starting point:

  A Philosophy of Software Design
  Algorithms
  Building Secure & Reliable Systems
  Clean Architecture A Craftsman Guide to Software Structure and Design
  Clean Code
  Code Complete
  Design Patterns  Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
  Next-Level Database Techniques For Developers
  Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
  Peopleware
  SQL Antipatterns
  The Clean Coder
  The Mythical Man Month
  The Pragmatic Programmer
  Working Effectively With Legacy Code

Again, take none of that as gospel, but maybe give them a passing glance.

Also, props to whoever mentioned learning by doing in a low stakes environment (side projects) and online communities!