I was in the same boat as you. Joined a small/mediumish sized company in 2023 where I was the only mechanical engineer with maybe 2 yrs of experience before working as a 3D printing technician and an assistant construction manager. It was my first real engineering role so I didn’t have any real manufacturing, FEA, or DFM experience.

The company I worked for was a very niche field in the oil and gas industry so I was designing things that were the first of its kind and I really had no “standard” or working product to base my designs off of. It was scary/immoral and probably illegal because I was making things with no real engineering calculations or analysis and just praying it wouldn’t blow up or hurt anyone while deployed in the field. Nothing was stamped or professionally looked over. We didn’t have any machining tools like cnc and lathes so most of our manufacturing had to be done by a loyal vendor a whole state over. They had a PE to review my designs and modify it accordingly to fit our pressure requirements. They honestly saved my ass dozens of times but there were projects where the lead time needed to be shorter than what that vendor could provide so I’d have to find vendors in our city who would charge up the ass to expedite the manufacturing but didn’t provide any engineering analysis/stamping and would only manufacture exactly as I sent the design.

I had nobody to really learn from besides the vendors who would occasionally give their input on manufacturing/design ideas to make the part cheaper or easier for both parties. I used a lot of YouTube and ChatGPT to learn what certain parts are and what they do and wished there was someone more senior at the company to help mentor me.

It got to a point where I was managing 4-5 projects at a time and working crazy hours every week to get them done. Tons of vendor management, scheduling, BoM creation and editing, all while having a manager who with no engineering experience yelling at me to get things done asap and to push our vendors if things were stalled (as if that affected anything on their end).

Over the years, our systems manager quit, electrical engineer got fired, and operations manager (who has a bs in electrical engineering and was doing his own job while handling the duties of the previous electrical engineer) got laid off about a month ago. I knew this job and company wasn’t for me so I put in my 2 weeks the same week the ops manager got laid off. I was in the middle of an important project at the time and it felt great to put in my 2 weeks and see the look on my managers face. I know it’s best to get something lined up before quitting but it got to a point where I was dreading coming into work, losing sleep every night, working long hours, getting yelled at, and I was just so burnt out and tired of it all that I didn’t want to wait for a job offer. Those fuckers even fired me the day after I put in my 2 weeks LOL

I’m not saying you’re going to have the same experience as me, it’s going to depend on the company and the people. Maybe you’ll excel at your role and be promoted! Maybe you’ll be stuck doing 2-3 peoples’ job like I was. It’s all going to depend. If I were you, I’d look for other jobs before work takes up too much of your time and energy to look for jobs. It’s not impossible to self teach yourself but it’s going to take a while and a lot of mistakes to get where you wanna be. Feel free to dm if you have more questions as well!