On 2/14/16 19:15 : , Peter Klein wrote:
Bravo, Paul! Go get 'em. There was never anything wrong with you. We
simply live in a time of systemic disruption where lots of good people
are being let loose, and lots of companies are focused on hiring young
people who will work for lousy pay and no benefits. Experience is not
always a plus, in fact, in the face of current trends, it is a minus.
Go figure.
Sadly, you're right. They want someone who's 23 and willing to work for
23-year-old money, but with my years of experience. It's been a long,
frustrating journey.
I feel really bad for my former associates who are now left to do the
same amount of work we had always been doing, but with half the people.
My own partner is now on call 24/7/365 with no breaks. Even if she takes
PTO, she's really still on call. And since she was the clinical half of
the partnership and I was the technical one who tended to hot-rod the
workstations to improve radiologist/cardiologist productivity, and she's
completely non-technical, she said she's been taking my name in vain a
lot in recent months as normal issues develop and I was the only guy who
built and supported those boxes. The docs are irritated as well, since
they know I was the only guy who could make their workstations run...
When our hospital, which for 70-some years had been a county hospital,
realized they needed a partner to build a modern building, they shoppped
around. The one organization they did NOT want to work with was the one
from Tennessee. Our administration chose a different group of hospitals
to join with. They did not have their own IT department, however, and
outsourced everything to Perot Associates (Uncle Ross's IT firm). So we
all started to fill out our paperwork to transition to working for Perot
instead of the hospital.
Before we could actually turn it in and get it processed, we got the
news that the Tennessee firm (I'm avoiding mentioning the 3-letter
abbreviation because I signed some sort of paper that said I promise not
to trash-talk them in public, in exchange for them not trash-talking me
in public... errrr.....) had just purchased our new owners, and by
default, we were part of the deal.
Here's the main difference. Our original new overlords were a group of
hospitals, run by hospital people. Our new new overlords are a business
management firm that happens to own hospitals. Actual quality of patient
care is far down the priority list behind pure profitability and getting
the CEO on the cover of as many financial magazines as possible as "Most
profitable CEO of the Year" nonsense.
That is why, in the middle of a major upgrade and change in hosting
platforms for our system's brand-new electronic medical record, the word
came down from On High to eliminate half of our department regardless of
whether or not we were critical to proper functionality. In fact, they
fired 80 non-nursing staff that day. Or at least that's what they told
the newspapers. Except that they also fired about a dozen clinical
technicians in cardiology, radiology, and respiratory. Spin-control
press release two days later said, "Well, when we said we didn't fire
any patient-care staff, what we REALLY meant was that we didn't fire any
bedside nurses."
The new overlords were used to buying small community hospitals without
any real IT staff. From Day One, they refused to understand how big our
group was, and couldn't come to terms that we had a fully-qualified IT
staff that had built and maintained all of our systems for at least 20
years. That struggle continues to this day. They still treat the
remaining staff like children who don't really know what they're doing,
so they pat them on the head and say, "There, there. I know this big
scary computing stuff is hard. We'll handle it for you" and then proceed
to make changes that do not fit in with our (and by that, I mean the
local hospital) existing applications and procedures.
When I worked for an academic institution, which shall go unnamed, the
problem wasn't the PhDs with egos. Although a significant subgroup of
them had trouble changing their passwords, and all of that group were
Mac users. :-) Our problem was the business prof they put in charge
of the IT department, who had graduated from the Niccolo Machiavelli
School of Management.
It seems that IT is very departmentalized at UC. There are several
different departments in our building, and we are responsible only for
our specific department. My new boss is an IT guy, and seems to have a
solid grasp on how things work.
My last employer before retiring (and my longest) was a "think tank"
company that had many public health researchers. Nicest bunch of
people I've ever worked with.
It's always a plus. My teammates at the former employer were great -
most of us had worked together for 10 years and had pulled together
through the tough parts in order to minimize the pain to our end users.
--
Paul Braun WD9GCO
Certified Music Junkie
"Music washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." -- Berthold Auerbach
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