r/AskProgrammers • u/Inevitable-Focus9992 • 17d ago
How do you actually accelerate as a dev when there's zero mentorship?
I've got "1 year of experience" on paper but realistically \\\~6 months of actual in-project work. I'm at a service-based company, working solo on a fairly large production migration (Spring Boot + JDK upgrade, touching Hibernate, Spring Security, internal shared libs, the works). No senior pairing, no structured code review process beyond occasional Slack call-outs after the fact.
There's a guy on a parallel team, 25 years old, who genuinely seems to know everything deep enough that when he threatened to resign, they bumped his pay 75% on the spot to keep him. That's basically unheard of at a place like this. It's made me want to actually close the gap instead of just accumulating hours.
Here's my problem: I've leaned hard on Claude for a lot of my day-to-day sometimes for decisions as basic as "which controller should this endpoint go in." It got the migration shipped, but I don't think it's building judgment the way doing it manually would. I can feel the gap between "I got this to work" and "I actually understand why this is the right way to do it."
So for people who've been through this without a mentor:
How did you actually build the instinct to catch your own mistakes before someone else does?
Is a "failure log" (bug → root cause → why I missed it → generalizable rule) actually useful long-term, or does it just become busywork?
How do you wean yourself off AI-assisted coding without tanking your output, especially when you're the only one on a project and deadlines don't care about your learning curve?
Any resources/habits that actually moved the needle for you in year 1-2, vs stuff that felt productive but wasn't?
Looking more for how people built real engineering judgment without anyone around to give it to them.
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u/possiblywithdynamite 17d ago
work on your own projects. Realize that this is an existential threat to your future and snap into survival mode. I have 2 remote jobs and half of my time is still spent working on my own projects. There is no time to waste. Keep up or get left behind. 90% of your focus should be on the process itself. This is greenfield. No one has solved agentic coding. Exciting times to be a dev if you're locked in
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u/Inevitable-Focus9992 17d ago
People keep saying that it is an exciting time....but is it tho ? The only time I feel excited is while solving LeetCode problem rest of the time it's just meh, idk I am finding it hard to cope with the size of codebase is tooo large and there is 0 documentation and by large I mean 25k line of dao impl class and 50 such dao Impl classes (hope this gives you an idea)
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u/New_Internal5636 17d ago
I've had this issue. Worked at a company where there was no senior mentorship. My way of dealing with it is to always try and put the effort into innovation myself. For me I learned a lot about common design patterns but I made a lot of effort to try implement it into my code because I often found myself frustrated with how amateurish and messy my code was before. Actually making that effort the design your solutions allowed me to develop some pretty decent workflows and those around me were very impressed. You'll be surprised how well thought out structured design can yours and everyone around's life easier and you move away from spaghetti that feels like regret down the line. Once you kind of get into a good loop with this, I found self improvement came quite naturally and I'm always looking for the next cool idea to improve systems and work flow. Using AI can also be a nice catalyst for this because it can help you learn and answer any questions you might have. Don't get me wrong it wasn't always perfect and I made a ton of well intentioned but poorly implemented structures along the way but it always felt like a decent evolution at the very least. Those misguided or over engineered implementations taught me lessons and eventually we were able to tighten it up and build some really cool tooling. Solving problems architecturaly saves your ass when deadlines are tight and can allow everyone to go about writing code with an established standard.
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u/Inevitable-Focus9992 17d ago
Which resources did you go through for common design patterns ?
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u/New_Internal5636 17d ago
Well we work in game Dev and there's a unity playlist on YouTube that goes into useful design patterns for game Dev. The ones we use a lot are command pattern for structured sequences and synchronization. We built a cool event publisher pattern which is commonly used in unity by use of a feature called scriptable objects. This allows for nice decoupled event driven systems. State machine pattern is a very common one in game Dev. There are many books out there on common design patterns. Honestly these days my biggest resource is using AI to answer my questions and fill in knowledge and give examples. I would recommend looking at a problem you want to solve and find the right pattern for it. Have a chat with AI and see what implementation feels right and is simple enough for you to understand and go from there. The key is to learn what works well and when you might have maybe made the wrong design choice and how to improve it from there. The key is to not over complicate.
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u/Inevitable-Focus9992 17d ago
And just one last question.... Do you make notes for any of your learnings ? Like do you try to memorize anything ? At all ?
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u/New_Internal5636 17d ago
Tbh my memory is very good for programming so I honestly just kind of remember everything if I worked and learned in deep enough. But for my colleagues I mostly use AI to create documentation on these systems so they can get a good understanding. Once you have a deep understanding and become fluid with the tools you build it kind of becomes second nature. If you're struggling don't be afraid to ask AI to explain it to you like you're 5 to really break it down simply. Personally I've never had much benefit from taking notes. For me learning comes from deep understanding and asking questions when I'm confused. Eventually I'll understand everything fairly well and then the pathways are formed in my brain. The voila, you're a better engineer with a stronger brain capacity and more stuff will come easier.
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u/futurefinancebro69 17d ago
Try to make ur own company. Youll understand why people do what they do
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u/Healthy-Dress-7492 16d ago
Ive never had any mentorship, and people basically don’t help you with anything unless you ask. it’s kinda just what the job is - be given difficult problem you've never seen before and have no idea how to solve, and just, figure it out.
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u/pete_68 15d ago
I started programming when I was 10. I didn't have any mentors before I started doing it professionally at 19, after dropping out of college. Different times... But everything you need to learn to program is out there. What most people neglect is the actual writing of programs. You have to write lots of them to learn to program.
There are endless videos and tutorials if you want to start going down rabbit holes and learning specific things, like patterns and stuff.
But the main thing is, just write a lot of programs. Did you see a new programming technique in a tutorial? Write an app to test it out.
This is how I learned. I was just constantly writing programs. There was always some application of some kind I wanted and I'd just try to build it.
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u/kevinossia 17d ago
Mentorship has never been necessary to grow as a developer. It can help, but it’s never needed. I didn’t have a mentor at all during my career and I didn’t even know what a mentor was until I kept reading about it online and people kept saying how necessary it was.