Okay.
When I took this new job, my biggest reservation was that it was for a brand-new software project in a company that does very little software. I was the first person, besides the manager, being hired on to the team, and I was concerned about the possibility of the project getting redefined or canceled.
This is the beginning of Week 8, and my worst fears are coming true. (Well, maybe not my WORST fears - they haven't decided they didn't need me after all, and thrown me out). But when I was interviewed, the manager told me he was going to be hiring 14 people. When I was hired, he told me that number was now 5. Now - he's got one more person starting on the 11th, and that's it.
Two of us. And neither of us has expertise in the area that is, in my opinion, the most critical piece in the whole puzzle.
Add to that the fact that I'm not actually writing any software all day - I am reading user manuals for commercial-grade electrical equipment, and I'm being asked to take their contents and convert them into PowerPoint slides that are essentially lists of the control points of each piece of equipment. There are hundreds of these in each piece of equipment, and there are probably 30 different types of equipment left on my list.
Each pass through this nonsense takes me about 3 days. So if I do the math...hm. 30 times 3 days each, divided by 5 days a work week, that's...18 weeks. Four and a half months.
Of writing no software.
Which is what I was HIRED TO DO.
I don't want to look like I'm job-hopping; but seriously, this is terrible. If I stay too much longer, the damage to my resume is going to be really, really bad. Never mind the fact that slogging through hardware specs - when I have NO hardware background - is turning my brain into oatmeal, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting a lot of it wrong.
I'm tempted to ask my headhunter how long I have to stay before he gets his kickback, and tell him to start looking for me the day after that.