I have roughly the same background with you (self-taught, no bootcamp, freelance, etc). The difference is that I got my first dev job in 2017. What you have exp

I have roughly the same background with you (self-taught, no bootcamp, freelance, etc). The difference is that I got my first dev job in 2017. What you have experienced is what I have experienced as well. Learning and understanding legacy codebase is part and parcel of being a software engineer. So be prepared that you will take a long time, especially at the initial stage to add feature. And for legacy codebase, a lot of work revolves around maintenance, cleaning, minor improvements. While looking at it individually, it might not sound like much, but taken together, it has great impact to performance, maintainability and speed of development in the future. What I have learn is most software engineers understand this. And they also do not expect you to contribute in terms of adding the challenging features that you talk about. What I can encourage you to do is to ask questions as much as possible. And if you know someone in your team is working on the challenging features, maybe request to pair with the person, or ask the person if he has the time to go through what he has done with you.