Hacker News Reader

Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

The EMR EPIC is written (at least at its core) in MUMPS. They do the same thing as you describe above to get employees-hire young CS grads from 2nd tier schools straight out of college, and they use good starting pay and low cost of living (its based in Wisconsin) as a lure. Of course once people are there..there's no way out except resetting your career.

View on HN

I applied (and was offered) a job at EPIC out of college - their recruiters did not at all mention MUMPS or anything of the sort until I was on-site and explicitly asked some of the engineers interviewing me what languages they used. I remember them demoing some of the new features that were coming out in their EMR - "group by" support in sorting patients, etc. Not the most impressive features, and it completely crashed while they were giving the demo.

Great food, cool campus, and I really liked Madison - just not what I was looking for.

"resetting your career" isn't any kind of threat when the reset would start higher than their current situation. More likely, there's no way out except resetting your life outside of that town in Wisconsin. And there really aren't that many good software jobs out there for the skill levels that accept jobs at Meditech/EPIC

> And there really aren't that many good software jobs out there for the skill levels that accept jobs at Meditech/EPIC

This assumes that everyone's skill level is fixed coming out of college, and that the interview process doesn't produce false negatives to let people fall through the cracks.

Those are both really unfortunate assumptions.

Epic is now working on switching to web technologies for the front-end, so if you're not one of the unlucky ones to be stuck on a purely core team, you'll get time writing Javascript and the like.

Interesting. What 'modules' are they going to push webtech to? Within the general UI or as subcomponents like the 2015 search add-in?

Hopefully everything someday. VB6 is a pain to maintain/add new features to.

dear god...it's about time[1]...except I shudder to think what their concept of "the web" might be

[1]aside from being a long-suffering user of Meditech, I am also a long-suffering user of Epic, who had the misfortune of going through "mandatory Epic training" at 4 separate institutions that were transitioning to it from Meditech, or pencil and paper. I am still not sure which of the three systems were the most technologically advanced...

I find Epic to be more horrifying than Meditech, because Epic has somehow managed to convince many healthcare workers that it is a "modern" product worthy of praise, despite all evidence to the contrary. People talk about SmartPhrases like it's some miracle instead of a damn snippets manager (and a bad one at that).

The fact that they're moving away from VB6 to a web-based front-end in 2017 should be reason enough to assume that whatever they come out with is going to be excruciating.

They're moving to web technologies but that's happening very slow. It could take at least 10 years at current pace. Source - I am ex epic employee

from my last contact, they've definitely accelerated their pace of migrating to the web. I bet they'll be out of VB 6 code within 5 years easily

but web doesn't necessarily mean modern in any sense of the word.

One of my college roommates got a job there after graduation. He's still there 15 years later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com