scott, how's your new job?

[pheck]

huh?

[nocrapchurch]

I'm actually at it right now. I'll need some time to put together a good sum up of everything. I'll give it a shot tonight.

Thanks for inquiring.

-scott
http://www.scottmanning.com/

[nocrapchurch]

I think the best way to describe the job would be: busy.

For those of you who don't know, I got hired by a big mortgage company almost four weeks ago. You're probably wondering what happened to all of my freelance work. Well, that is still going on; I just contract most of it out now.

Functional Architect
That's my job title. What is means is I am the guy who designs what the site will look like - the layout, theme, etc. Right now I'm working on a new lender system that will take care of corporations' lending and borrowing bids, transactions, etc. Its actually pretty complicated. When I print it all up on paper, its about 500 pages long.

The job works me pretty hard. Its salaried which means that no matter how much I work, I still get paid the same. Even though its a good price, that can be frustrating at times.

Well, that's the sum of it. I've got to get back to work. Thanks for asking.

Workin' for da Man,

-scott
http://www.scottmanning.com/

[nocrapchurch]

Well, now that I've had this job for over a month, I know lot more of what I'm doing.

The company I am working for, MortgageRamp, is a subsidiary of GMAC. We have several projects we are currently working on. The one I am involved in is a new Lender System, as mentioned in the previous post.

MortgageRamp is actually one of ten companies selected by Microsoft to be the models for the .NET platform. So our new system will be developed entirely using .NET.

The project team is huge, but not big enough for the job. These situations always involve fitting 10 pounds of crap into a 5 pound box. When its all said and done, we'll have around 20 developers, 8 architects, 5 business analysts, 1 project manager, and 2 functional designers (I am one of them) working on this project. We actually have guys from Microsoft that we are contracting to help us do this job since the .NET platform is so new.

I have currently mocked up almost every square inch of this system. All I am doing is laying everything out how it should look on the actual HTML page. Then we pass the documents around to our business analysts and architects who tell us what will work, what needs to be changed, what is just too much, etc. When we finally have everything looking as it should, then we'll pass it on to our developers.

So the job involves a lot of talking to all types of people and re-doing of things. Sometimes it can get frustrating because three different people will have three different opinions from three different life-long experiences in the mortgage industry, but you still have to find the right answer. I actually enjoy it though.

The launch date is this summer.

-scott
http://www.scottmanning.com/

PS - I don't want you guys to think of me as "the guy working for the big mortgage company". I would prefer to just stay Scott from scottmanning.com when I'm on the boards. Thanks.