New job

Today is the 3rd day at my new job - and so far, it is a real break from my last gig (can a 2.5 year position be called a gig?) The code base is an order of magnitude cleaner than the last codebase, is driven by hibernate, spring, and struts and was done more or less correctly, with no massivly visible lacunae.

To all future managers of software groups - your team wants to make good code. Your team wants to make good code for a good reason, and it is not an abstract geeky reason, although the two are often correlated. Good code leads to fast development and fast learning.

At my last company, it took me several months to get up to speed with enough of the code base to make additions to the system. At my new company, it took me about 3 hours before I was coding and being productive. That is a lot of money the company saved by giving their coders time to fix broken code. Right now, my old company is desperately trying to train someone to even understand their system... good luck.