I am now the most senior developer in my company after 7 months working here and I have no clue what I am doing.

Long story short, over the last 3 months a start up head hunted all of the devs (3 total) that were here before I was hired in March. This includes my former manager and the guy who was promoted to manager when he left, plus another junior dev who didn't deal well with all the turnover and decided to follow his friends.

Over this time we have been desperately hiring devs as fast as we could and what is left is 2 brand new devs and me plus 1 QA tester. All of them are newer than me.

I became the interim manager when the second guy left, as I was the last Senior Dev on the team.

Now here is the real problem: we are a ruby on rails shop and every member of my team switched stacks from .NET to work here.

Our project is a Rails app and 7 months has not been enough time for me to master Ruby/Rails or figure out how all of it works (the language and framework are fine, but our app is complex), and I am pretty quick to pick things up, usually. The rest of my team is basically brand new to Ruby/Rails so it will take a while to get everyone up to speed.

As the interim manager, I am doing my absolute best to restore stability, maintain good moral, and figure out how to run this show… oh yeah did I mention that I am also responsible for ALL dev ops and anything else tech related? I had basically no experience with Heroku before I was all of a sudden reponsible for our Heroku servers and everything.

On top of that, there is a shit ton of technical debt in our app. It was originally built by a contractor and suffered from being a start up project where speed was more important than quality for years. Only recently has the company been well funded due to an aquisition, but there is huge pressure still because we are not profitable.

I have applied to the management position I am currently in, hoping to make it permanent, but it just keeps getting harder. I am starting to question my prospects here. It doesn't help that I am relatively inexperienced… almost 4 years as a developer but no management experience. I was similarly thrown into the deep end like this at my last job… I delivered but was miserable and on the verge of going crazy the whole time. I feel like I have learned coping skills that are making this time better, though.

Anyway… I am trying to figure out a good strategy for dealing with my situation. The business has ambitious goals and I know for a fact I will be telling them "no" and "that's unrealistic" like a broken record for their asks, given my team's situation.

How do I create space for myself and my team to get up to speed?

How do we get up to speed?

How do I not have daily panic attacks?

How do I explain to the business how royally fucked our situation is? They are not tech people but I need them to grasp the gravity our challenges… they come from an industry where private domain knowledge and tech stacks are not a factor.

Is my situation as fucked as I often feel it is?

Any other advice is much appreciated. Thank you.