They did what??

According to the leaker, force-placed insurance works precisely the same way. The processes within Balboa have been industrialized such that people are only doing one step of a multi-step process, over and over, and never see the full picture. Processing speed is a focus and is financially rewarded. The bonuses require people to process 200 to 2,000 loans per day, depending on the job function.

There's been kind of a dodgy "leak" reported concerning a large bank. One analysis of the leak is the source of the above quote. I find it kind of shocking that the system described seems to fit very neatly into my experience of the contracting world. I often use the following metaphor:

Imagine a group of engineers. One engineer is very good with avionics and he's working on a system to control the flight of a new aircraft. He writes software, generally. He may consult with other engineers building the electromechanical systems, or serve as a subject matter expert.

Another engineer is an aerodynamicist and perhaps works with CFD (although often, you'd have a CFD specialist working in a somewhat detached position from the aerodynamicist). This engineer is working on control surfaces. Occasionally he may exchange emails with the avionics guy to let him know how the flight package is going to work.

The next engineer is working on payload. He wants to be able to carry 2770 kilograms, and needs the payload to be modular so that just about anything can be carried, given it meets certain density and power requirements.

Of course, there has to be a guidance person on board our project, so there's an engineer who is working with GPS constellations, JTIDS/LINK16/etc, and he probably has the occasional conversation with the first engineer, avionics guy, to make sure that the two of them can reliably and consistently share information. But, in my experience, they're working with a standard that's been agreed-upon in the contract. So they may not actually talk, but they're probably both working towards the same standard of information exchange, or a data layer, or something.

Next, you've got a guy who's doing propulsion. Propulsion engineer is working on a powerplant that has some kind of peculiar restrictions on weight and size, but he's got an idea of how to make that work, and so he is diligently at work making a very high thrust-to-weight ratio turbofan that has a short service window.

I could really go on here, adding in people like project managers, IT staff, and the like, but the moral of this story is that all these engineers are working on a cruise missile. In general, they do not know this, and the only way they'd all figure this out is if you put them in a room and had them draw their individual parts on a whiteboard. We do this for all sorts of reasons in "The Industry," which I won't go into here. But I find it truly shocking that the banking industry, of all people, has mechanized their process to the extent we have in the bombs-and-killing industry. Perhaps on reflection, it's not so very surprising, but I don't normally consider myself to be one of the tinfoil hat people who equates banking with The Devil and Big Evil in general.

A second possibility here is that any industry that becomes this mechanized is almost guaranteed to be – at best – up to no good or – at perhaps worst – downright evil. The major difference between "murder" and "genocide," for example, is mechanization. And there are any number of people who will tell you the Industrial Revolution is the root of all the modern world's problems, from disease to poverty and class inequality. I'm not really one of them. But it's kind of easy to see how the argument can be made.