On a positive note, this is some good experience and some of this is a good story when you interview for your next job: independently managing a multifaceted project and having the self discipline to teach yourself a bunch of new skills.

In the grand scheme of things, I wouldn’t worry too much about the project not working perfectly, because it seems like they gave you an impossible task to do on your own. And yeah, idk what they are thinking with that salary. Build up those resume bullets and have some confidence going into your next job search once you feel the time is right.

What is your education?

I can tell you as someone who took a lower paying job at the start because my phd wasn’t in Ml it’s a lot of fight to get your salary raised.

I can also tell you as someone who worked in a smaller company where top management had no Ml expertise their asks were unrealistic a lot of the time, the timelines were unrealistic, and they rarely were able to articulate clearly what they wanted.

I eventually left after years due to this. The one big positive for me in that whole time is I was free to come up with solutions how I saw fit and I also had a lot of control into how I got it done. It all just required me to be constantly managing expectations. Which if you are like me, is very frustrating. I most likely had more influence than your position warrants so I’d keep that in mind.

Finally, even when my pay started low, it was higher than what you are making and this was years ago.

I’m happy to discuss more and/or help if I can.

Is this core part of the company’s work or a long shot? they might just have put on a wild bet on the project and now looking to drop it.

See how much money the project will make in different time frames and try to get people to be enthusiastic about it. get a green or red light from your skip levels, higher the better. if you are cut from the higher levels or simply just don’t know how to even begin the conversation, try to find why that is the case.

All this is given that you busted your ass off and were smart going about your work.

If you have dropped the ball, which happens, ask for 2 months to wrap things up.

I ask for 2 months specifically when this happens and drop all my plans outside of work…

2 months is sort of the sweet spot because 1) dropping the ball in the first place means I wasn’t in the rhythm and gonna have to build up to it. 2) I can’t drop everything else more than 2 months.

In the first month I do a bit of dmg control, reassess success metrics, set out a month plan, see what’s missing and try to estimate risk of the project for the upcoming month. I try to set the simplest chain of goals that will lead to demo/presentation/release. Thing is, there shouldn’t be any project that can’t be wrapped in a month’s time. If you don’t see the project getting wrapped up in a reasonable time(working at nights and weekends) that usually means that some part of the project is escaping you(missing requirements, design, docs, lack of understanding of an science aspect or business). You need to come up with a concrete plan to attack it and ask for more time. It is unreasonable for a boss/manager to expect and employee to know everything or pick up everything with very little effort or time. Employee just needs to be vocal and smart about where they are at with the work and ask for help.

You said you asked for help and none is provided. Have you tried arcane spells of forgotten? Oh they don’t exist you say? Well there might just be not much to do…

A working project counts for a lot. Kudos for getting as far as you have. As a person who has worked for startups for a lot of years now, I can tell you that your efforts count for a lot. I don’t know your background exactly, but I’m sure you have a lot to learn about a lot of things. Getting good at all of it can take the better part of a decade, and the senior people on your team know this. You’re likely safe in that regard. They’re not mentoring and helping because they’re busy, not because they disapprove or dislike what you’re doing. That’s just how things are, usually! In terms of making your project better, I personally rely a lot on logging to make the bugs and behavior more visible. DataDog is very helpful. Linting is another force multiplier that makes your code much less buggy and much cleaner for minimal effort on your part. Good luck, you got this!

When you say it works, but not flawlessly, can you elaborate? I would definitely recommend looking for other jobs and it sounds like the project you have led would be a great thing to talk about in the interview. The experience you have sounds like it will be very helpful going forward and make sure you remember how you feel as a junior in the future when you’re mentoring others!

You should make your manager aware of the work load each task implies. If they do not care, then the managment is bad.

Im in the exact same sort of position. Anomaly detection built in java backend, data discovery and extraction with sql and sqoop, spark/Hadoop data preprocessing, ml model training in cloud and a rest API for it all alone

Seems as if you ended up hired in Spain!