Vendors' Plea to Loan Officers: Please Stop Saying It Should Be Easy
It is, in fact, that hard. It has always been that hard. Please stop saying it isn't that hard.
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The Association of Mortgage Vendors (AMV) released a statement this week asking loan officers across the country to “please, for the love of God, stop submitting feature requests in Facebook Groups and saying ‘it should be pretty easy to do,’ ever again.”
The statement, which runs fourteen pages and was clearly written by someone who has not slept properly since 2021, outlines a pattern of behavior that vendors describe as “a full workplace mental health event.”
It begins the same way every time.
A loan officer attends a demo webinar, watches a feature that took eight months and four engineers to build, and says, unprompted, “That’s great, but can it also do this?” The “this” is then described in one sentence, occasionally accompanied by a hand gesture, and followed immediately by “I think it should be pretty easy to do.”
“I’m not a tech guy,” said one loan officer who requested anonymity, “but I just feel like it should connect to my CRM, automatically pull the borrower’s data, understand their goals, reformat it, send a personalized text, update the file, price the loan, notify my realtor partner, send a closing gift and maybe do a little birthday type thingy on their closing anniversary. I don’t know, like a button, link, dropdown, or maybe even a personalized app or something. How long could it take?”
The development team assigned to evaluate the request has been on leave since Tuesday.
According to the AMV, the phrase “it should be pretty easy to do” has now surpassed “How can I get my old view back” and “our last vendor was able to do it” as the leading cause of engineer resignation in the mortgage tech sector. A single utterance in a product meeting can set a roadmap back three months. Two utterances in the same meeting have been known to cause spontaneous Slack channel deletions.
“We once had a loan officer describe a feature as ‘basically just a button,’” said one senior developer who asked not to be named and also asked if there were any job openings in an unrelated field. “That button required API integrations with four separate systems, a complete rebuild of our authentication layer, and six weeks of compliance review. He asked for an update two days later and said we seemed slow.”
The AMV’s statement includes a brief glossary of phrases loan officers should retire immediately, among them: “it’s probably just a quick fix,” “my buddy’s nephew could build this in a weekend,” and “I saw something like this on TikTok.”
Vendors stress that loan officer feedback is genuinely valuable and that they want to build products that make their lives easier. They ask only that feedback come with the understanding that software development cannot be accurately estimated by someone whose primary technical achievement this year was updating their iPhone without losing their contacts.
“We love our users,” the statement concluded. “We want to serve them well. We are simply asking…begging really, that they stop telling us how long it should take. It will always take longer than they want. This is the nature of software. This is the nature of existence. Please, for the love of all things holy, stop saying it should be pretty easy to do.”
At press time, a loan officer posted in a Facebook Group about redesigning the entire User Interface said, “It should be pretty easy to do.” The lead developer closed his laptop, walked outside, and stood in the parking lot for an undisclosed period.
He has not yet returned.
The Mortgage Poop is satire. The parking lot is real.