In the category of "It's obvious that there are huge chunks of the economy which need one SFBA-startup quality workflow web app", I give you blend.com , which did that for mortgage origination at banks / credit unions / independent mortgage originators.
It's one of those magically mundane things. The business process here is extremely well-understood; the actual front end and backend processes in the US for mortgage origination are, and this is a technical term, a roaring pyroclastic tire fire.
I went through Blend's white labeled process while trying to get pre-approval to hopefully help a family member out, and literally sent a human two emails "Sorry only have 15 minutes so no possible way this is done today" "Erm ignore the last I think it's ready for you."
This is helped by me being preternaturally organized but sufficient data entry for a mortgage application being collectable in 15 minutes is pretty stunning to me, even with all of the documents ready to go.
If you want to read about mortgage origination and understand why "Hmm this seems like a frontend-heavy web application that one could reasonably deliver in a hackathon" is not coextensive with the actual solution, see amazon.com/Digitally-Tran…
(Disclaimer: read critically.)
A non-obvious challenge here is that the most important consumer for a home mortgage is not obviously the person buying the house, it is the GSE or other financial system entity which is going to securitize the mortgage.
They have *much* more exacting requirements.
And, structurally, they will *never* talk to the person buying the house, the bank that person has the down payment at, the HR department certifying that that person is gainfully employed, etc etc, *but* they have a lot of very specific questions for *all* of these people.
And so the mortgage loan originator has to have all their paperwork together and pre-reviewed prior to sending it over to the securitizing party.
And if they don't? Well, then they're at substantial risk of either eating the home loan or carrying it on their books for 7+ years.
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A contractor said something during this project which I thought was both compassionate and the sign that he was a skilled professional, and I thought I’d share:
Scene: My mother, who has some mobility challenges, is sketching out what she wants in her kitchen. He listens.
Then he takes me aside. Following conversation is indicative.
Me: All sound reasonable?
Him: I’ll build whatever you two decide on, but I wanted to have a conversation with you in private first.
Him: Nobody wants to get old and nobody wants their parents to get old, but it happens to everyone, and may God grant your mother many happy years.
Me: Thank you for saying that.
Him: How big do you think a wheelchair is?
Me: Mom doesn’t…
Ruriko: I asked at the train station how to use the automated gates to get the child’s rate for Lillian.
Me: OK.
Ruriko: That was really hard.
Me: OK.
Ruriko: Then I asked the attendant how old children could be and still receive the child’s rate. Do you know what she told me?
Me: I will bet it did not include a correct answer.
Ruriko: How can you work as a train station attendant and not know that answer.
Me: *sigh* America.
I try to be non-partisan in professional spaces. That is due, in no small part, to the acceptable spectrum of opinions in tech spaces as having been about 70 nanometers or so wide for much of the last few years.
Also, related to that, there is this fun game which is played on Twitter, where you adversarially claim that someone represents their employer, elaborate that something they have said causes a workplace safety or PR issue, and then ask for them to made an example of.
One subvariant of them is that early adopters of LLMs outside of companies are going to tell those companies *things they do not know about themselves.*
People often diagnose malice or reckless indifference in a SOP which misquotes the constellation of agreements backing e.g. a rental contract.
Often it is more Seeing like a Really Big Business issues than either of those. Everyone did their job, system in totality failed.
I'll observe two things which are counterintuitive:
1) You might naively assume that "identities" get more valuable as one moves up the socioeconomic ladder, but there is a discontinuity, because certain societally-favored identities have payment streams associated with them.
These go down sharply in working class and don't rise above that level again until you either a) get fairly deep into the upper middle class / PMC or b) somehow manage to get someone's full social security payment, which is (for various reasons) much less likely than other ways.