I graduated college a few months ago and recently started working as an entry-level software developer at a big company in the silicon valley.<p>I once worked as an intern back-end web application developer, and it wasn&#x27;t too challenging because most of the frameworks I worked with had an immense amount of online resources to learn from. And the code base wasn&#x27;t too big so it was easy to pick up on.<p>But at my new job I&#x27;m working with a 20+ year old enterprise code base that relies on internal tools with ambiguous documentation. I don&#x27;t have a mentor assigned to me, but I do work closely with the lead engineer to ramp up. A good portion of what he says goes over my head, so I either ask for clarifying questions or take notes and do research on my own.<p>There&#x27;s a lot I don&#x27;t know. I made an effort to keep notes of everything my coworkers and lead engineer say, as well as documenting my progress in learning all the technologies. In some ways I&#x27;m expanding my knowledge daily, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s quickly as I&#x27;d like, and sometimes when my coworkers ask if I understand how x or y works and I don&#x27;t, it seems like I&#x27;ve made no progress on learning at all.<p>This is my 2nd month here. The first month I spent setting up my dev environment and waiting to be granted permissions to various services. Now that I have a real assignment, I slog through this massive code base and have no idea what I&#x27;m doing. I ask for help but have a lot of stupid questions and feel like I&#x27;m wasting everybody&#x27;s time because I can&#x27;t resolve things on my own. I generally have a good idea of what I don&#x27;t know and how to learn it, but in a lot of cases I don&#x27;t know what I don&#x27;t know and thus don&#x27;t know what to ask, or how to ask a good question.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m being too hard on myself since I&#x27;ve only just started working and it&#x27;s my 2nd month, but a part of me feels like I should be getting better at figuring things out a lot faster.
Ask HN: Overwhelmed with new job. Feeling totally stuck.