Have you ever gotten a job working on a project you generally understand conceptually, and on day one, with zero knowledge of the specifics, you are now in charge of said project with no one to ask about the standards or procedures?

Then again, why would you ask anyone, after all, you're in charge.

Sure, it is the norm when you are the first inhouse dev or replace the single inhouse dev that left before you got hired.

Hell yeah, that is how you grow in this industry. Getting exposed to new technologies/projects at unexpected times, getting to learn new technologies by trial-and-error methods and all that.

I was a Laravel dev in the beginning, but then some dev quit in an ExpressJS/MongoDB/AWS project and I got that assigned to me. Initially it was difficult for me but I managed to pull through.

But Hey, I got to put all that on my resume which is good for the long run.

1 month after I joined, the whole team had resigned. Does that count?

I cleaned up a lot of trash coffee but my new manager turned out to take all the credit...

My first job was fullstack, and ever since then I'm that guy who can take over that project from the person who is leaving or has already left.

It's definitely love/hate. It's fun to just get this entirely new stack in your lap and be exposed to not only new tech, but new methodologies and practices that keep you from slipping into that "my way is the best way so I have no reason to learn other ways" bubble. It's why I am a religious follower of keeping things not only simple, but as standard and default as possible.

The worst part is definitely when there is an expectation that because you've worked with tech X before, you should be able to hit the ground running for this 6 year old monolith project that uses X version 0.103-preview with thousands of lines of custom unneccessary indirection and a dependency on the windows registry. Now give an estimate for this new feature without sandbagging it.

So as a js developer I joined the company as they needed someone who has experience with react and vue.

I get the project that is mix of micro-frontend vuejs components and server side xml cms that is so obscure that stackoverflow has total of zero topics related and the actual documentation is shoddy. After two weeks I am the sole developer on this project and totally responsible for it.

A bit more than a half year later I ask to get switched to some js-related project as this is not what I signed up for and HR was talking alot about headless, nextjs, SSGs and other Jamstack buzzwords.

Cms is discontinued but we were supposed to give support for it next 2 years, so i just wanted to work on something else as this was so far from my point of interest.

They said that I am victim of my own success, nobody picked up that shitty setup so fast and done so much on the project. They had to find 2 guys to replace me since I did backend, frontend and a bit of DevOps!