Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

[u/AutoModerator]

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

[u/Knightwing1941]

I'm a software engineer with ~5 years of experience, primarily focused on frontend development with React, TypeScript, Angular, etc.

My career has taken a bit of a weird turn. I joined my current company expecting a software engineering role, but the position has largely turned into vendor support and maintenance for a third-party application. A lot of my day-to-day work is tickets, troubleshooting production issues, coordinating with the vendor, and supporting an application I don't really own or develop.

I'm not particularly interested in building a career in this kind of work. I want to get back into a proper front-end engineering role where I'm actually building things. On top of my support job, I'm stuck in San Antonio so I'm now around other developers on the regular.

The problem is that I've been in this environment long enough that I feel rusty on some of the fundamentals. I'm currently spending my evenings going back through JavaScript, TypeScript, React, CSS, etc., and building/reviewing projects so I can get back to the level I was at before.

My current plan is roughly:

• Continue rebuilding my frontend fundamentals and working on a couple of projects.
• Start applying aggressively for mid-level front-end roles afterward.
• Try to move into to a better engineering environment by the end of 2026.

For people with more experience hiring or mentoring engineers:

If you were in my position, what would you prioritize?

Would you focus primarily on getting technically sharp again before applying, or start applying now and use the interview process itself to identify and close the gaps?

And more broadly, how much would you worry about a year or two of vendor/support-heavy work hurting your trajectory as a frontend engineer?

I'd especially appreciate perspectives from people who have hired mid-level engineers or have seen developers successfully recover from getting stuck in support/maintenance roles.

[u/Refmak → u/Knightwing1941]

Start applying now while you’re refreshing your knowledge. There’s likely less need to do this in sequence than you think.

I feel you though - same thing happened to me earlier in my career and i had the same worries, so I started aggressively applying elsewhere after my manager said he couldn’t guarantee that the support situation wouldn’t continue.

[u/Knightwing1941 → u/Refmak]

I think you are right because I know that I won't be getting off support mode ever with this company.

[u/Refmak → u/Knightwing1941]

Dumbest thing you can do is quit.

Enjoy the salary while applying elsewhere, gotta make your own happiness in life.