6 months is not very long, so it&#x27;s not surprising that you don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s already available in your company&#x27;s codebase. That&#x27;s true whether it&#x27;s monolithic or not, in Java or another language, on a single server or a fleet of raspberry pis flying around on drones. In fact, assigning you tasks that involve tweaking existing components is <i>exactly</i> what most companies will do in order to get you familiar with the codebase (and style, process, etc) while they they get familiar with you.<p>* Don&#x27;t worry if you have to replace parts of your code. That&#x27;s just part of the process, especially if the existing code is undocumented and everyone knows that. The code reviews are working.<p>* However, if at all possible, get feedback early in order to skip straight to implementing the feature with existing code. You&#x27;ll finish features faster, get familiar with the codebase sooner, and hopefully move on to more interesting tasks sooner.<p>* Document existing code as you discover and use it. This is technical debt that your company needs fixed, and you&#x27;re in a great position to help with that.<p>In school you get to write a lot of our own code from scratch with our own ideas, and it&#x27;s fun. Some developers pump out code by the minute, even implementing the same thing over and over again in their own code; it&#x27;s fun, and there often aren&#x27;t repercussions for that in school. But code re-use <i>is</i> good practice. I love days when I produce net negative lines of code in an existing codebase, while adding a feature.<p>Not every company offers the opportunity to implement your own ideas from &quot;scratch&quot;. In fact that&#x27;s somewhat rare. If this is the only coding you enjoy, you may need a new company, but you may just need to wait a bit longer at your current company. A good advisor&#x2F;boss will be able to have a conversation with you about expectations (going both ways) for the first and second year. You&#x27;ll want to find out if your company can eventually provide the kind of projects you want, especially as you get a better idea of what those are.