WMC Mortgage #

After the Hilton contract ended, there was some weeks and it could have even have been months before I found another engagement. The next job came through a headhunter who was looking for people who could program in Visual Basic, porting over from software that ran on a mainframe. The language of the original code was pretty easy to follow so this was a fun little project that didn’t even require a lot of thinking. The contract was for three months but as they let other people go as they completed various phases of the project, they kept extending my stay. In the end I was there for 2.5 years.

The whole thing was built like little mini programs that would be called up from a main menu. It was almost like a crude micro services which is what everyone is thriving for today instead of the big mammoth sized programs. You could easily rebuild just one component and replace an esisting one without affecting the system at all. You could have users working with the program while other modules were being developed.

Somewhere around the end of my time there, WMC was purchased by GE Capital. This is the financial side of General Electric. They wanted to expand their credit card business to include the mortgage business. That is when they first got to understand what a sub-prime loan was all about. Companies like WMC and Country Wide which were the largest sub-prime lending institutes in the USA played a very big part in the total collapse of the housing market. Anyway, when GE took over they really wanted to get rid of all the contractors that worked there and made it as easy as possible for us to leave. It was right at that time that I got a call from Cynthia Fish who was another One, Inc employee who eventually got on permanent with Hilton, to work on phase two of the Hilton project, doing what we did for reservations to catering. I jumped at this chance because it was see the end of my engagement with WMC.