21–30 of 86 posts
Sometimes working in Healthcare is annoying (Changes are slow and there are legal restrictions everywhere, e.g. any time you mention the word "cloud" the C-level folks yell "but HIPAA!" and refuse to listen), but it's still good to know we're doing meaningful work.
Well, I can pay for my mortgage and I can keep food on the table for my kids. Yep!
For whatever it is worth, position I have now is a lot of what I was looking for professionally and I can be 9-5. Thankfully, they want output and not butt in seat. It is not saving world and have no such illusions. But my work is occasionally useful to real people I know personally and I work in team of people I trust.
Yes, helping people with chronic medical conditions improve their health and quality of life.
It is easy to deceive oneself that an app or a tracker equals health... better than pen and paper and minor instruction manual.
Now if you're actually working on safety critical health devices (say, insulin pump or oxygen meter or maybe a CPAP or perhaps heart monitor), then I hope you're working on cutting the price tag as they're super expensive for not really any good reason...
We were trying to figure out a reliable way to track sugar levels relatively nonincasively but found out that it was less accurate than a chart and simple alarm...
Sometimes being actually rational sucks, you see that your junk does not work or that you have to be smarter than super well funded geniuses at MIT or Stanford to matter. And have comparable fabrication and chemical analysis facilities and biolabs to even attempt anything.
Research is expensive. As in really expensive now in terms of hardware. As in some big universities not in USA being too poor to afford hardware. That's not even counting lab space to actually house it.
Yes it is. We build a machine that shaves of pennies from donations to orphanages and funnels them directly into hedge funds. To do so we have to build a neural network! and in Tensorflow no less! And here is the real kicker: I rewrote the interface in Haskell. If that isn't meaningful, I don't know what is!
Cool, what kind of fossil fuel does the machine run on?
Why would meaningless and 9-5 be synonyms? Why does late evening imply meaning and regular managed schedule lack of it? Why would a company on edge of crash implied more meaning then the stable one? For whatever it is worth, position I have now is a lot of what I was looking for professionally and I can be 9-5. Thankfully, they want output and not butt in seat. It is not saving world and have no such illusions. But m…
Working in Healthcare/Education is pretty rewarding knowing the products we put out are helping people (both improving education for new doctors and improving clinical care). Sometimes working in Healthcare is annoying (Changes are slow and there are legal restrictions everywhere, e.g. any time you mention the word "cloud" the C-level folks yell "but HIPAA!" and refuse to listen), but it's still good to know we're do…
I agree that it is rewarding, and it doesn't feel that slow where I work. We cover more than half the hospitals in our country, and a couple of university-hospitals. There's plenty of change they want - and (surely the university ones) - have plenty of ideas of what they'd like to see.
For us "but HIPAA!" is "but GDPR!" for quite some time though. But we're hardly unique in that.
It's definitely a nice industry if you want to have a meaningful job. But it does come with some stress as well though.
EDIT: Fix my English :D
I work because I must provide for my family. That's enough meaning for me.
On the other hands, I often donate to wikipedia, supporting local FOSS communities and mentoring young students. Currently helping my friend with his air pollution measurement station project too. All that I won't be able to do if I take a lower paying job but more meaningful job (previously I was working as a civil engineer, building bridge and stuff).
Nope. I work in equity research and am lucky enough to be on the team that I'm on, but it doesn't seem meaningful or worthwhile. I generate investment ideas through industry, company-specific, and technology-specific research and then publish these ideas in reports for my client base. Most of my job is then debating investors on specific technology investments or trends. Sell-side finance (e.g. investment bank) is br…
And isn't the work very interesting? (at least for the first 8 hours)