Ask HN: Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?

there was that one time laura loomer chained herself to the twitter building, but that was more a one-person publicity stunt than a protest.

this does seem about par for the course for Epic installs, which suffer a great deal of typical enterprise software disease. i have fond recollections of their user-facing staff training including a dedicated section for "how do i, a new grad with a sociology degree and 3mo of EMR training, convince a bunch of decade-veteran nurses and physicians that i have enough industry knowhow to effectively advise them how to navigate their complicated EMR install?"

if not a in-person protest, this did remind me of an extremely early 2010s meme format on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt1BPvMbNpk

I haven't seen literal protest, but at my old job, there were several forums (one public, one pseudo-anonymous). When software rollouts didn't go well, there were loud protestations on those forums. Examples include new video streaming software botching a live event; VPN software that performed inconsistently; and business software that made the front-line business workers' jobs a lot harder.

No one ever staged a walkout. It was at a company serving military members and had many workers from that background... I think "stuff sucks" was part of the life. But after sufficient complaining, some projects were fast-tracked for improvement and frontline buy-in.

This is mostly a local thing (for now) and most local papers in Norway paywall basically everything.

Anyway, it’s even worse than a cumbersome software. It’s part of a digitalization process of Norwegian healthcare. You would think that since we basically have one provider, the state, they would go for one unified platform? Think again! Norwegian healthcare is split up into 4 health corporations which are kinda sorta like private corporations. Each one of them have run separate processes to acquire a platform of their own. One chose Epic and the others chose another provider. So quadruple the work to choose and implement the new digital and unified journal and probably some extra on top to integrate the different providers.

The icing on the cake is that the local municipalities also have health services and were expected to use the same platform as the local health corporations, but many of them are getting cold feet now, so who knows what will happen.

The joys of neoliberalism I guess.

Years ago I talked to a guy who worked there and at that time they were using VB6. I am sure it has changed now. Anyway I read that Epic sue TCS because some of the contractors from TCS stole its code.