I am a junior / new grad and I am working at my first job out of school. The software team is very small (around 5 people) and we maintain a very large project. Since the project is so large, each member of the team is responsible for a specific part of the project.

Other members on the team work on embedded and low level programming. I am responsible for only the web interface to the project.

I recently just figured a solution for a problem that I had been exclusively working on for almost 2 months.

I tried asking for help from other members of my team when I was working in this problem. However, most of them told me that they do not have the time to become familiar with the my codebase inorder to help.

As a junior, what am I supposed to do in this situation? I know I could’ve asked a question on stackoverflow but I thought that if members of my team helped me, it’d be a beneficial mentorship experience.

What are your thoughts?

Another question I have is, what does mentoring a junior look like? Most of the time I am working alone. Am I supposed to find / create opportunity for mentorship or are my superiors? I’m just a little lost

In a normal company once a new person joins regardless of your seniority level you should get an onboarding that includes overview of the codebase, business logic and domain. Also a buddy should be assigned to you who would be responsible for making sure your onboarding and first months are smooth.

If you joined a company where there is no proccess for onboarding and no plan for your growth and you are on your own then get the hell out of there. Yes maybe u will get the work done but you will have imposter syndrom and u will never trully trust yourself.

My advice is find a decent company with a decent scrum team and all proper processes. If I were you I would even go as far as work for free for a month just to get my foot in the door.

Your priority is learning now, not earning. And if youre on your own anyways then might as well start building small projects and posting them on internet and leverage feedback to grow faster. I bet u would learn more than in ur current job.

Is it really even a team if no one works together.

My first software-related job was also in a very small company where I was considered a subject matter expert after only half a year with no senior engineer working on the same thing (which is bad imo). Although I could manage the hurdles I encountered, it took unnecessarily long to figure stuff out and I think I would've preferred being able to have someone to discuss my issues with.

If you feel a big need to have guidance, make it clear to both the team and management. If they don't act on it or try to work around it, I'd suggest you find a company which actually does offer a healthy ratio of junior/medior/senior team members who can help each other out.

But of course, that's easier said than done and you should most definitely do what you feel most comfortable with. As long as you stay true to yourself and your gut feeling I doubt you can make a wrong decision in this case, since I sense a need of guidance from your post which you lack in your current team.

Good luck!!

As long as you try to stay assertive regarding asking for help (after trying to fix it yourself first) you're doing the right thing. And about your second question: I personally see mentorship as someone who you can go to for guidance regarding how you can be productive (and effective) in your role, ideally: how do you design and implement a feature from the ground up, how do you tackle issues, perform debugging, and which of the solutions x, y, z should be the best one because they know from experience which one works best in which situation.

What I noticed most (and what mentors should prevent) is that new people tend to get stuck on problems for way longer periods of time than I would've expected them to be. And then 8/10 times it's the steps they take to try and debug something while running around like a chicken without a head instead of first thinking about *how* and *what* to test

@Bibbit I remember senior teaching me that if u are stuck longer than a couple hours on something, go talk with someone and ask for help. Juniors want to prove themselves, spend days on something and sometimes even take work home just to push through something and in the end its not even the most efficient solution so has to be refactored. Then they get triggered while the situation could have been prevented if they asked for a right direction in the beginning. Learned it the hard way myself.

Mention this issue in a forum with your managers and your team.

Most managers today have taken a class in Agile product dev - and Agile states that it's inefficient to have dragging projects due to lack of team effort.

As a junior this can seem daunting. "Aren't I supposed to be able to handle this on my own" etc

But most managers know that it's not about blaming individuals - it's about resource allocation.

Perhaps it's more efficient to have 2 devs build a major feature for the site during a 2 week sprint then have you join the others to focus on their stuff during the next sprint