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Medical research comes to my mind. Endless amounts of knowlege about the human body are still waiting to be discovered.
if you want a guaranteed job, where you want.... learn how to program the medical charting apps.
EPIC is a major player and as someone who spent over 20 years in medicine IT, let me tell you a good EPIC programmer/developer is worth their weight in gold. They get a cushy roll and they all seem to have a good time. Bonus is they can't afford to lose you once you have a grasp of their systems.
Medical charting apps is a very good suggestion. EPIC is not a good suggestion - they’re not a good choice for their customers. Contribute to alternatives to EPIC instead.
I would love some examples of how they aren’t a good choice for their customers.
Drawbacks of EPIC
Super expensive - only large outfits can even afford it.
Poor design - a multitude of modules that often use different design principles so knowing one module doesn’t help much with another.
Extreme vendor lock-in - EPIC is very similar in business model to Microsoft in the first decades, basically a mafia.
Lack of interoperability - EPIC interfaces poorly with lab and diagnostic equipment, EPIC actively fights development and adoption of interoperabilty standards.
Dictating Clinical Workflow - EPIC is designed primarily to assist billing, not record keeping for patient benefit. Thus workflows are highly constrained and significant time must be spent clicking about to get the system to let one do normal things.
I mean, EHR is inherently complex so any EHR, but EPIC makes it much worse than it needs to be.
I work in IT in healthcare at an epic shop, and everyone I’ve ever talked to that has either worked at or knows someone who works at epic says it’s a meat grinder. They seem to like young staff that they can work long hours for several years, so may want to ask around to see if their work culture is for you.
Also, if I was looking for rewarding programming work, an EMR would not be where I’d look for many reasons.
FWIW, I know several developers at Epic who are happy with the job, the work/life balance, and have been there for years. OTOH, I know several people, too, who were project managers, and that's 110% true. Epic is big on academic performance. It wants people who can put their heads down and grind, without asking questions or sticking up for themselves.
Until they burn out...
Twenty years ago, I briefly worked for a research group doing genomics stuff. The researchers couldn't code worth shit, so they had a hard time analyzing results in a reasonable amount of time. It was easy to be a hero.
I suspect new researchers would be way better coders (I assume AI may help too).
The pay was shit.
Nope, most researchers are still poor coders. Coding is a skill that takes time to learn if you even have someone who can check your shit (very rare). "Vibe coding"/using AI for research analytics is probably done and it is also probably shit.
Pay is still shit.
Tracks
About those genomics stuff... most biomedical researchers still couldn't code worth shit. It is bad enough that there are even dedicated computational biology programs now (I was in one), and from personal experience I confirm that even comp bio graduates can barely code worth shit and are also somewhat bad with biology
Pay is still shit. So... yeah.
That's shitty on a bunch of levels. Is there a bright side? Are there jobs out there?
To be fair I might have exaggerated a bit... I can navigate my way around pretty advanced statistics/machine learning stuff, it's just that I don't have enough fundamentals to call myself a programmer; I assume most of my classmates are similar. But on the positive end, there are a lot more advanced methods in biomedical research now. People used a lot of cutting-edge machine learning in biomedical research (case in point: IBM and DeepMind had biomedicine in mind when they are trying to diss chess champions with AI models). Also there are some very competent programmers/research groups who ended up building open source bioinformatics tools that everyone could use, even though it seems against the hyper-competitive trend of biomedical research. So even if individual labs couldn't do much, there are indeed better tools/pipelines available now
I... think a lot of research labs/pharmas are still pretty desperate for competent (or just any) bioinformaticians? Not in computational biology/methods development though, that field is too competitive even for me (and there are a surprisingly large amount of AI/ML/LLM slop)