To Quote Han Solo...

... ahhhh, you know how it goes.

The new job is starting to be, well, annoying. Maybe that's not the right word.

As reported earlier, the guy who hired me quit about a month after I started. Which means he submitted his resignation two weeks after I started. Which means he was already thinking very, very hard about leaving when he hired me.

But with this market, it happens. So if everything else is okay, it's just a blip on the radar.

That's not the only contact on the screen though.

Since I started, most of my team has either been on vacation, away on training or both: so trying to implement team-wide changes tends to be difficult when you can't get them in the same room. As holiday season closes with the long weekend, this shouldn't be a problem anymore. But I've already seen that a healthy work ethic is ... I won't say absent, but it ain't doin' too hot.

When trying to implement the smallest of changes (say, for example, that I want a chance to review all service tickets before they are closed to get an idea on how much and what we do for maintenance) it took about three weeks before I was getting over 50% of them.

Don't get me started about trying to get them to report their time on a weekly basis.

Today raised a huge red flag: a big project I got dumped on me had to be architected, as the newly appointed architect was away on afore-mentioned training and holiday. It's pretty basic stuff: abstraction of the interfaces to a third party provider.

One of the developers (the one I know is going to be a continual source of resistance) didn't understand why I designed it this way. So I explained it.

When I got back from interviewing a guy who had no business calling himself a software developer, I found the member of my team with the questions asking the architect on why it's being done this way. After it was agreed that we were doing this way. And not just "agree-to-disagree". The developer did say that advice from the architect was needed, and I agreed to that. I had thought that it would happen when I was actually present.

At first, the architect defended the design, agreeing that a level of abstraction was required. The developer persisted and under an onslaught of pestering, the architect relented and said he'd think about it. The really annoying thing is that the developer is really good technically at a code level, but a severe lack of understanding of building enterprise-level applications is pretty much pervasive in the team.

Does not bode well. And something tells me I shouldn't be publishing this.

But then again the three-month probationary period works both way, and we're half way through. I don't particularly like the idea of starting the job hunt all over again. If I learned one thing from my last place of employment though, it's that you need to look after your own damn self.

A bit mercenary, but so was our dear captain of the Millennium Falcon.