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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

I ran into this with a web app to automate unenployment insurance claim processing.

It sounds so boring but it turns out that every state has their own process (that they change without notifying you) and they use different pieces of data to identify workers and companies. Also everything was still paper-based so we got a scanned image and OCR text.

This was 10 years ago and we were doing fairly large scale NLP in PHP, matching millions of documents to claimants and companies and doing some amount of fraud detection.

It's still among the most interesting projects I've worked on.

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Awesome example: most work can be interesting, when getting into the nuances.

However, all works and companies do not incentivize doing whatever work interestingly.

A few questions I use for potential employers:

- What's one idea that you came up with and implemented, in order to make your company better? What was that process like? (Read: find out how much the company supports bottom-up innovation)

- What's the process for getting adopting a new dev tool or standing up a new server at your company? (Read: differentiate between command/approval-driven companies and need/self-serve companies)

- All the basic boring stuff: What's your CVS system? Is code visible across the organization? What's your knowledge system? Are documents searchable and visible across the organization? What's your CICD system? (Read: make sure you aren't walking into a dumpster fire where basic hygeniene has been neglected)

That work wouldn't be related to SIDES would it? If so hats off to you and yours for making such a resilient piece of software. I've been working with my states unemployment offices since the pandemic and just the interoffice differences have been causing issues with automation. I don't even want to think about making something work across state lines.

This was right before/overlapping with the beginning of UI SIDES (now there's a term I haven't thought of in a while)!

For some forms the system actually put all the information from various sources on a digital recreation of the paper form we received and faxed it off. We only did that for the most common forms though.

I learned so much about database schemas and performance, since as I'm sure you've seen you often receive claims just before (or sometimes after) the response was due and if they're a minute late the claim gets paid by default and if the claim is due at 4:30 the HR person will casually log in at 4:28 to upload several documents and fill out a lengthy form.

That's a write up I would like to read.

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