I was thinking for a while about the title of this question and I do not know it fits this well or not.
I have already been working for 6 months as a software developer (C# developer) at one of the government agencies (15 developers). This is my first job and before I started working here, I had been working on a freelance project (finished with success, which helped me to get job here).
On the job interview, I was told that I would participate in rewriting one big, old software (which has more and more problem as time goes). They said me that, despite that, they had lots of projects, so I would have an opportunity to gain experience. In short, I accepted an offer.
At first day of my job I found out that there was also another new employee (dedicated for this project, he has previous experience in database development). So in sum, 2 new employees and 1 old (has been working for 6-7 years working here), who knows this project and constantly supports it.
We (new employees) started becoming familiar with this project (I had some other small tasks too). After some time, I was told that before writing a new project, it would be better to make improvements to the specific part of the existing one. They gave me the guidelines and after 2 months I have successfully finished these improvements (I have changed SQL db to NoSQL, added custom paging, filtering and much more).
They said me that everything was ok and that they would host new version on the server to test the application, before production. They did it after 2 months and they haven’t tested it yet (they say that they do not have time).
I have asked several times our team lead why this was happening and he said me that they really want to start working on this project but he can’t promise me to do so. He says that there are a lot of things that must be decided and considered before. I want to gain much experience so, I asked him to work on another project instead of doing nothing. He said me that he would think about it.
After a month, he asked us (new employees) to start writing improved version of very small project from scratch. This project has the lowest priority among others.
Working on this small project is really playing and not more. I am learning nothing new and I am really worried about it. My chance to get promotion is 0% according to this situation.
What does the team lead do? He spends some time as program manager and some time as lead developer. He gives guidelines to the developers (5 in total) that are working on high priority projects and as usual has no time left.
What do you think about this situation? What can I do?
P.S Agency is looking for new developers too..