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Tomorrow is my last day at Countrywide and I feel like I should mention the occasion as I don’t even think I mentioned the fact that I took a job at Countrywide last April. After a quick search on this blog I see that I did mention the fact I was going to Countrywide, but never anything about the job itself while I’ve been there.

I need to say that the people I worked with were impressive, helpful, kind, and all-around good people. I was involved in a couple of good projects, working with good technology (Spring, Spring MVC, Spring-WS, Maven, Tomcat, etc.). The problem was that the whole “sub-prime crash” really screwed things up.

I showed up at Countrywide a month before things starting going south. Once the stock started tanking upper management announced a massive layoff. Thousands of people were let go, luckily nobody on my team was affected. However, once the layoffs started I noticed a difference. Things/projects started moving a bit slower. I’m guessing there was a lot of project cutting/”re-prioritizing” going on.

My leaving is partly related to the job cuts at Countrywide. It’s also related to the large amount of AS/400 RPG work that is being done there. Something I have NO experience with, and no interest in gaining the experience. Those two factors along with some non-coincidental events outside of work (user group meeting, my son’s school, and church) are taking me to a new company.

I’ll cover the new gig in a future post, using this one to gain a bit of closure with the Countrywide gig I’m wrapping up.