6 months is not very long, so it's not surprising that you don't know what's already available in your company's codebase. That's true whether it's monolithic o

6 months is not very long, so it's not surprising that you don't know what's already available in your company's codebase. That's true whether it'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 exactly 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. * Don't worry if you have to replace parts of your code. That's just part of the process, especially if the existing code is undocumented and everyone knows that. The code reviews are working. * However, if at all possible, get feedback early in order to skip straight to implementing the feature with existing code. You'll finish features faster, get familiar with the codebase sooner, and hopefully move on to more interesting tasks sooner. * Document existing code as you discover and use it. This is technical debt that your company needs fixed, and you're in a great position to help with that. In school you get to write a lot of our own code from scratch with our own ideas, and it's fun. Some developers pump out code by the minute, even implementing the same thing over and over again in their own code; it's fun, and there often aren't repercussions for that in school. But code re-use is good practice. I love days when I produce net negative lines of code in an existing codebase, while adding a feature. Not every company offers the opportunity to implement your own ideas from "scratch". In fact that'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/boss will be able to have a conversation with you about expectations (going both ways) for the first and second year. You'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.