Hacker News Reader

Comment by telecomhacker | Hacker News Reader

Part-time MUMPS programmer here for a health system in NYC. I still love writing in it. The rates are way better than other eco-systems (e.g. Python, Java, blah blah) , probably because the eco-system isn't diluted with low-wage workers from India/China. This is because 95%+ of Epic/Ex-Epic employees are American. I would even argue it is the patriotic language of choice due to that reason.

Expected pay of 85-120/hour, which pays way more than my full-time job. It's a fun language to write in, and the adrenaline rush you get when you get a triple index loop working is awesome.

Also random fact - according to Epic HR , the average college GPA of Epic employees was 3.5, which is probably the perfect formula in hiring loyal corporate servants. I always thought it was weird that I had to apply with my transcripts and resume.

View on HN

> I always thought it was weird that I had to apply with my transcripts and resume.

I similarly thought it weird when Garmin asked me for transcripts when I applied there a few years ago. It had been 15 years since I'd graduated, so I was lucky I still had a couple copies of my official transcripts from back then. After spending the effort to find and scan them in with my 3.8 GPA, didn't even get a phone screen.

I'm not sure I love paying it with worse health services though. My city has sunk almost a billion dollars into a dysfunctional Epic pile of MUMPS.

But I guess it's nice to see the healthcare software disgrace works well at least for some.

> My city has sunk almost a billion dollars into a dysfunctional Epic pile of MUMPS.

I don’t know if the alternatives - e.g. Oracle Health/Cerner - are really that much better - and if Epic is as bad as you say, I suspect that says more about their corporate culture than choice of programming language

That was the story why Epic was chosen. It was made to be a dilemma between Epic and Cerner, by design.

In reality it's not a dilemma. In other cities and countries there are EHR systems from other vendors that work less bad and with lower cost.

I primarily work on clinical data, and from that side, the technology stack—MUMPS included—has its quirks but generally gets the job done. The real dysfunction in U.S. healthcare isn’t the software or the language itself, but the system it’s built to serve. The core issues lie in the incentives around revenue cycle management and the structure of the insurance industry. Blaming MUMPS is like blaming COBOL for bank fees—it’s the system, not just the syntax.

I'm not from US. The dollars were converted from euros. Our Epic/MUMPS installation is 100% tax funded single-payer with no insurance company involvement.

But MUMPS is indeed more a symptom of a rotten industry. E.g. the bidding process that led to this mess was very corrupt, from all sides.

Man this is an interesting comment.

>probably because the eco-system isn't diluted with low-wage workers from India/China.

Are there other technologies like MUMPS that have the same characteristics?

Not technology but you need to be a US citizen to get a security clearance for jobs that require one.

If you don't mind me asking -- how did you find a job like this? I live in NYC, I'm looking for work, I worked briefly at Epic, I don't mind MUMPS, and honestly something involving MUMPS sounds like it's probably more my style than a lot of what else is out there. I don't really know how to look for jobs like this I'm afraid!

Makes me curious about getting MUMPS to run locally on a Mac. I had great fun with it 15 years ago.

https://hub.docker.com/r/intersystems/iris-community

Should be super easy.

There’s also a native Apple Silicon tarball that I’m not sure is as easy to get your hands on.

https://gitlab.com/Reference-Standard-M/rsm is small, no-frills, really cool. http://yottadb.com if you want one with all the bells and whistles.

The GPA of 3.5 is their minimum for considering a candidate.

That's far too low if those are current USD figures; you're hurting your and others' incomes by working too cheaply in a niché field. I was making $280k TC as a Rubyist at Meta or $10k/week consulting 10 years ago. That's not anywhere near as niché as Erlang/Elixir/Phoenix, OCaml, embedded Haskell, or embedded Rust. Or COBOL. ;o)

It’s purely remote and super chill. Not everyone wants to work on ads/compete with Indians/Chinese. I’d rather make 200k helping clinicians be more efficient using ML than $300k+ optimizing two tower models to increase the CTR on ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com