Comment by zdware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zdware | Hacker News Reader

I worked a tiny bit over a year around 2013 at a hospital network and was on a team that maintained custom integrations with Cerner, an EHR system.

It was by far one of the coziest jobs I ever had. Low stress environment, redundant meetings, etc. But development of any kind of god awful. It was extremely sluggish, lots of red type, and seemed to follow a manual QA approach over any sort of automated testing. Things were just too lax in general.

Myself and another junior developer left after we noticed that an intermediate engineer on our time hadn't committed in over 3 months.

My point of this story is that hospitals didn't seem to attract/retain passionate software developers. With high turnover or apathetic developers, most software built custom for hospitals is probably Frankensteined.

Agreed, this mirrors my experience in healthcare. Hospitals pay the highest amount of money, for the lowest quality of software (regardless of whether developed internal, or purchased through healthcare software vendors).

The jobs are easy, and you can go months without doing any real work whatsoever. The company might not even care (since for hospitals, sales cycles are often measured in years, and minor upgrade cycles are often measured in months).

But this kills any desire to do anything. Almost no developer with any motivation or skills, wants to work somewhere where they do nothing useful and have no real work to do -- even if the pay is good, you can literally feel your brain rot out, and you start to be worried you'll never get hired at a "real job" ever again.

It's just a bad cycle of events all around.

This was my experience in government work too. For every three engineers that accomplished nothing, there was one doing real work. Most good engineers would work there for 6 months or less and then flee in boredom or fear of not finding work at a "real job" again. The good engineers that stayed often found a niche they really liked, and were worshipped as rock stars by management and stakeholders, so they were pretty happy.

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