How do I know my level?
I'm currently working in a data analytics type roll for a company that is very much not tech focused. The team I'm on basically helps do data analysis as contractors working with a very large retail company that is built on top of some very unintuitive legacy systems. You just need someone to tell you that "desc37" in one of the SQL tables is the correct name for a thing, and you can't trust the "name" field of that table. That sort of thing. For the past year my primary side project at this job when not handling any of the typical requests for reports has been to build out a Flask app (we aren't allowed to use Node.js on any of our work computers, so that also means all my dynamic UI stuff needs to be old-school jquery instead of any modern framework stuff) which can handle a lot of the common questions we get asked. Previously if someone asked us "give me a list of all products of this type and how many stores they will be in 6 months from now" that would have been a whole thing of jumping through the hoops to do the SQL queries and clean up the data to deal with all the messiness, but because I built an app which can handle a lot of those requests it's super fast and easy. My problem is that I really have no point of reference for what this is like compared to a "normal" dev job. Do junior devs usually build and maintain ~4000 line flask apps to automate data analysis tasks? There's only a couple people at this company who even have the skills to verify if my app is returning the correct answer (which it does like 95% of the time) and when it doesn't it's 100% on me to figure out where the bug is or if I was given some logic to follow 3 months ago that is no longer true, so now I need to change the process. It kinda feels like I'm acting as a senior dev and a product manager at the same time, but I'm getting paid like a low end junior dev, and it's not like I can go to other employers and show them the code base cause it's full of sensitive proprietary stuff. How do I even know how my work stands up to "industry standards" if I work at a company that doesn't really value tech/coding skills and I have no idea what things look like at companies who do?
I'm currently working in a data analytics type roll for a company that is very much not tech focused. The team I'm on basically helps do data analysis as contractors working with a very large retail company that is built on top of some very unintuitive legacy systems. You just need someone to tell you that "desc37" in one of the SQL tables is the correct name for a thing, and you can't trust the "name" field of that table. That sort of thing.
For the past year my primary side project at this job when not handling any of the typical requests for reports has been to build out a Flask app (we aren't allowed to use Node.js on any of our work computers, so that also means all my dynamic UI stuff needs to be old-school jquery instead of any modern framework stuff) which can handle a lot of the common questions we get asked. Previously if someone asked us "give me a list of all products of this type and how many stores they will be in 6 months from now" that would have been a whole thing of jumping through the hoops to do the SQL queries and clean up the data to deal with all the messiness, but because I built an app which can handle a lot of those requests it's super fast and easy.
My problem is that I really have no point of reference for what this is like compared to a "normal" dev job. Do junior devs usually build and maintain ~4000 line flask apps to automate data analysis tasks? There's only a couple people at this company who even have the skills to verify if my app is returning the correct answer (which it does like 95% of the time) and when it doesn't it's 100% on me to figure out where the bug is or if I was given some logic to follow 3 months ago that is no longer true, so now I need to change the process.
It kinda feels like I'm acting as a senior dev and a product manager at the same time, but I'm getting paid like a low end junior dev, and it's not like I can go to other employers and show them the code base cause it's full of sensitive proprietary stuff. How do I even know how my work stands up to "industry standards" if I work at a company that doesn't really value tech/coding skills and I have no idea what things look like at companies who do?
