D E S I G N A T E D

Seethetarians in this thread

He's of Italian descent.

The probation period is my main worry. The project hinges a lot on me and him working well together, so I don't want to make that not work, or make it struggle.

There's usually a pretty solid hierarchy in UK companies, at least from a development side. You have the Junior - Mid-Level - Senior progression. It was the same at my last place (I was actually a Senior on the job role) where you have Juniors under the Mid-Level and Mid-Level under the Senior.

I always listened to other developers though, I saw the role less as a "I'm the boss" position and just that I have more responsibility for what I'm doing. If I didn't listen to some of the Juniors (who haven't had the time to gain some bad habits :) ), a lot of good things would have been missed.

I'm from the UK, so that might explain why I'm a bit hesitant to get confrontational. I'm still on my probation period so I don't want to annoy and lose my role.

I like that, I think it might do some good to level with him and just ask those questions outright. I might see if I can muster up the courage to do that tomorrow morning.

He is technically higher than me on the job, as a supervisor, so it feels quite difficult to go to him and say: "Well, I think you're wrong.". I know it shouldn't be difficult, but that type of conflict just isn't something that's common to me.

Thanks for your points, there's some really valuable stuff here.

I'd say he's in his early 40s, and I try not to be ageist since I've had some outstanding older developers that I've worked with, but I think he's perhaps stuck in his ways a little bit.

Unfortunately, it's just me and him which are building this new API with no other developer involvement. So it's kind of like a "he said, he said" scenario. Another unfortunate to pile on top of that is that we don't work in Agile sprints (I've worked that for the past 4 years so it's quite a change for me), so I only speak to the other developers once every 1 - 2 weeks. The only daily contact I have is the "Senior" who is in charge of this specific Laravel project.

I love the idea about sitting with him and talking. At first, he seemed quite cold to me. It warmed up a bit last week but now it's back to cold, so I'm not sure if I just caught him on a good or bad day, or if I'd said something to upset him.

He was pretty firm about not doing either the OpenAPI or Composer things today, I tried to push a little bit, politely, and just say in the nicest way I could that Google Docs wasn't the best fit for what we needed and that we'd probably be doubling-up on our work in future. He seems very focused on the time the project will take, and it feels like he sees any suggestions as a burden.

You do realise that every single social platform favours your way of thinking? You are pretending like you aren't fully in charge.

All you need to do is shout "my feelings!" and you get results. Like toddlers shouting for cookies.

I was one of those people, I've been changed. I know a lot of other people too. Maybe try to look outside of an echo chamber sometime.