Unfriendly and unprofessional environment. The middle manager over our department delegated a lot of responsibility to seniors or "team-leads". The people in these positions were not only very young and inexperienced but also downright immature and catty. They clearly held their personal friends to more lenient standards than the rest of us and took good care of their friends when doling out various work assignments. There were times when people at adjacent desks would be supposedly working on important projects and I would hear nothing but whispering and giggling (not exaggerating here) or in some cases loud talking and flirting for 10, 15, and 20 minutes at a time as I was working my hardest during a very busy day. I eventually invested in some earbuds. Also, I witnessed cases of well-connected people getting picked for promotions over those who were clearly superior candidates in terms of tenure and performance. I noticed that (shocker) young entry-level people whose parents or family members worked at the company or BoA/CW managed to move out of the trenches and into much better positions with the most incredible speed.
The Moorpark location is a long drive from most parts of L.A. It is actually in a business park on the outskirts of town which is even worse because you have to drive 5-10 minutes into town if you want to eat somewhere other than the company cafeteria. It was announced to us that everyone in the company would lose one of their discretionary days but the exact explanation given was that both discretionary days were to be replaced with a single "religious freedom" day. Interesting. Around the same time, the company became much more aggressive about hiring many more new workers as temps and also keeping them at temp status for as long as possible. Many temps (I was not a temp) of over 6 months tenure who had proven themselves to be solid employees were still being denied conversion to full employee status (and therefore all benefits). Given what I know and what I've heard about the history of Countrywide and Kurland's involvement in it, I probably should have come in with lower expectations.
