Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

yellow_lead

This post seems to have all the qualities of a highly popular HN post

* Anti-incumbents in large industry

* Poor customer experience / hit piece

* The new tech company does it much better

* Doesn't try to understand the intracacies of the industry being criticized (wire vs. ACH???)

I know very little about banking and even I know (roughly) the difference between ACH and wire. My point is not that the author lacks intelligence, just that they should, as other commenters point out, try to learn about banking before you're so quick to criticize. I think us programmers suffer from thinking "this is all too complicated, it could easily be done simpler and better." That's not always the case and it can help us to understand how the current system came to be before making these judgements.

View on HN

Agree. This is a prime example of a blowhard programmer making a bunch of naive and half-true accusations. I see things like this in healthcare constantly.

>I see things like this in healthcare constantly.

Cosign. I worked in healthcare for the better part of a decade and spent just over five years of that doing data interchange (mostly HL7).

It's always somewhat amusing when threads about it pop up on HN because it almost invariably winds up with smart programmers insisting that these have to be simple problems that would be easily solved if only we were using the right API, while having zero understanding of the business and regulatory requirements that, in reality, make many of the things attached to it very difficult to get right in a field where you literally have the potential of killing somebody with a severe enough mistake.

"it almost invariably winds up with smart programmers insisting that these have to be simple problems that would be easily solved if only we were using the right API"

Because they are. Make the common case fast. There is no reason to expose all possible complexity to every transaction.

>Make the common case fast. There is no reason to expose all possible complexity to every transaction.

Hint: addressing that is exactly what HL7 has been doing for over 30 years.

The easy parts are easily solved because they're easy, and the easy parts are 90%+ of any given integration.

Those remaining hard parts are where the time and effort goes, and a lot of them are very fundamental things that seem easy until you try to actually do them.

"Simple" things like ensuring that you properly match a patient to their preexisting medical record are incredibly fraught with unexpected complexity that you can't handwave away with an interchange format.

Agreed, 100%! It always reminds me of the episode of "The Office" where the warehouse wins the lottery, everyone quits, and the office staff are conscripted to load the truck with paper. Searching for a way to load the truck more efficiently, one of the main characters is astonished that the warehouse workers never tried backing the truck into the warehouse to be closer to the paper. Believing them to be morons because they hadn't thought of this, he implements his solution and causes a fair amount of damage to the truck and the building because he didn't stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the people who had been doing this work for years (work he had no real experience with or insight into) might have had a good reason or two why they hadn't already implemented this solution.

It's a silly example, sure- all I'm trying to say is that there are usually a few pretty good reasons why "the solution is so simple, just do x" comments haven't already been implemented and the commenters don't usually have the context to know that. It's been my experience that a lot of problems with seemingly simple or obvious solutions haven't been solved that way for good reason.

I feel your pain. I've had to stop clicking on any healthcare related threads around here. It's too infuriating.

Totally. You have to work in Health IT to know just how fucked it is. Before being in the industry I was convinced it was low quality, shitty tech people.

In reality it’s massive monolithic slow moving orgs that data block, create black boxes, have poor documentation, and just generally don’t want to move forward.

Specifically I’m referring to EHR vendors and other legacy systems. Not necessarily providers or even payers.

Yeah, one of the things this guy might not realise is that if they thought he was money laundering they'd not be allowed to tell him that's why his account was closed. (it is illegal to tip-off).

The one thing to remember about retail banking is that it is highly regulated. There might be restrictions on visibility. That means that different support groups can see different things and only those things.

Exactly. I'm very glad that not everyone in a bank can see all details about my accounts. If the bank believes a transaction was fraudulent, only very few people will see why it was flagged to avoid customers gaming the system. Not nice to the customer but crucial for the financial system to work.

Trying to understand the basic primitives of banking is hard.

When I lived in the US I asked my bank for documentation on how their stuff works.. I've done the same in Denmark.

I've never been able to get authoritative documentation that explains IBAN, routing/account numbers, transfer types, checks, signatures, credit/debit cards, etc.

I'm effectively left guessing, my bank can't even tell me if a given kind of number is secret or security sensitive.

How do you find out? Where is the authoritative documentation? The man page? The RFC?

They are all in various international standards. The specification for IBAN, for instance, can be found here https://www.iso.org/standard/41031.html

Yeah lol, when the new auto-debut rules came around, a coupleyears after that, my bank still wasn't aware that the customers could set whitelist/blacklist rules !

The point about customer service failure remains valid, and other countries do do it simpler and better.

Learning about the current system is likely to make outsiders more, not less, judgemental ("how has it been so bad for so long?!")

This would be true if there weren’t several examples of countries that know how to do it. EU and ANZ come to mind. There’s a thread above describing the details so I won’t repeat them again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com