Comment by leonth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leonth | Hacker News Reader

Greetings. I was exactly at the same position two years ago but decided to get my license and work as a pharmacist instead.

I am not sure how invested you are against working as a pharmacist, but I would humbly suggest that you at least do that for a while (perhaps 1 to 2 years). Being both an experienced healthcare professional and hacker/developer enables very wide career opportunities. You will be the most tech-savvy pharmacist in the department/company. You will be the most efficient in any kind of data analysis (because your peers are having trouble learning to use Excel Pivot Table while you are writing scripts that take the files as input and perform 1000 Pivot Tables in a second). You will be tasked to be the go-to person for anything remotely related to the million-dollar enterprise software the pharmacy uses. You will get to be involved in the most technologically advanced project the pharmacy is having (think automation, robots, electronic medical records).

In the startup world, the professional status gives you instant, significant positive reputation gap as compared to your usual competent-developer-without-domain-knowledge kind. Not to mention the advantage of having extensive domain knowledge should you manage to find an idea that somehow involves pharmacy.

After that, you can slowly think to get your CS degree (as I am thinking of getting in the near future), or just do the Coursera courses along the way. As you would have some experience working as a pharmacist already, this credential (plus all the experience being involved in pharmacy IT projects) would stay even after you get the CS credentials.

[PS: I'm in Singapore working in a public hospital here.]

Hello Leonth!

It's a nice feeling knowing other people out there are facing the same situation. Actually, I'm expected to work as a pharmacist at the family-owned pharmacy and manage a small medical office (3-4 offices). I'm partner in the pharmacy, owner of the medical office. The pharmacy work is extremely demanding but my parents will work there, they just need help. The medical office is 20-days old, so it's extremely easy to handle for now.

I'm planning to work at least for 2 years full time in these positions and see how it goes from there. I'm already building small-scale applications (using ruby) to solve problems that arise, setup a digital-signage system using RPis, etc.

However, I'd like to get a better, more 'rounded' education at the same time which would allow me to skip to IT, if I ever wanted too.

thanks for your comment! :-)

ps. Out of curiosity, what was your thesis about?

Nice to hear back from you. Seriously what are the odds of meeting another pharmacist in HN? :)

Your situation seems to be very fortunate and I'm sure that heading to pharmacy is something your parents are pushing for :) Since you're a partner already, I believe that in the coming years of working in your pharmacy you will be able to apply even more of the programming skills to help operations.

I think if one has a desirable portfolio of projects and good referral, getting a job in IT should still be possible even without a relevant degree. Keep also in mind that not all IT work needs programming on a daily basis unless you are a real hardcore engineer. From what I see there is as much opportunity in vendor support, project management, integration (need technical chops but more on the ops/networking side as compared to programming), at least in enterprise IT here. People already working in these sort of work can very well be less proficient in programming as compared to you right now.

Aside - here not all students do thesis because of the limited number of professors, but I did a shorter thesis-style project about finding gene signatures that may give rise to resistance to imatinib (Glivec). Used a modification of Support Vector Machines (SVM) and recursive feature elimination. It was fun and took the life out from my old laptop because of the heat from crunching the numbers :) Want to hear about your thesis as well :)

Yeah, what are the odds? :-)

Yeah my parents are eagerly waiting for me in the pharmacy, my sister too! But anyway!

My thesis requires building a Proof of Concept sequence alignment program. Should be able to compare sequences (proteins and DNA/RNA sequences) and also give a sequence alignment score in order to test if say a bacteria has the substrate to produce a specific protein.

I'm building it using the ruby Sinatra framework. It's more about bioinformatics but my professor was very pleased to have a student that could build even an elementary system like this because for BLAST was complicated!!!

I choose my thesis early though, otherwise I'd choose to build a system where you put patient data and proposes medication/therapy (from drugs to lifestyle changes).

Btw, if Greece is anything like I think it is like, there's likely a vacuum in good on-line prescription handling. The hard part of such a system is really the domain knowledge, contacts and legislation -- so that's something to think about. Should be worth a few billion if you can get that market.

There are some half-hearted attempts at getting something along those lines off the ground here in Norway, partly hampered (in a good way) by strong privacy concerns, and partly by inertia and hopelessly backwards practices by various MDs.

I've sometimes wondered if the best way to get such things up and running is to simply configure up a dedicated terminal that's set up to connect to a vpn, and ship it out to the various offices. Say an Intel NUC style box or a netbook or something with an SSD and no moving parts. Rather than having to deal with a million configurations, just settle on Debian stable, ipv6-over-vpn and require an Internet connection (or use 4G if available -- even better -- control the whole stack).

It is after all how the Military handles secure communications (well, when they get it right).

The considerably new (4-5 years old) online prescription system we have in Greece has many issues (scaling to name just one). The company that writes the code is underpaid - was not paid for months, so much that they stopped support at a point in time, I know because I spoke with a dev via twitter to resolve an issue - and it has the state as a contractor.

So I’m not sure what exactly do you have in mind but I live in a small town North of Greece, where less than 15 people know what Linux is (to give a perspective). There’s no way I could get even a fraction of a state contract.

What I’m thinking of building though, was a software to medical office management, targeted to the Greek market (RoR/JS) for management of bigger and smaller medical offices. Could work as a SaaS. There are at least 6-7 SaaS services for medical office patient management that I’ve found online that offer essentially nothing more than just a DB and an interface with ICD-10 support/calendar/etc. I’d like to build something that interacts with the state’s online prescription system, which can read the medical history on the fly, notify if there’s any double subscription, give data, stats, etc. We’ll see, for now I'm stalled.

But it’s not a billion market. Not even a ‘million’ market IMHO. Could in Norway, but not in Greece.

Well, if it's a state contract, that would be difficult. I would envision a private system that deals with MDs and pharmacies directly. But if there's already a government contract (with accompanying legislation) -- then, that's probably that (The idea being that the MDs paid a certain (small) fee per prescription or something, and that the patient could get it filled at any pharmacy).

Sure, if there's room for an office management platform, go with that.

(Btw, it would appear I was guessing at what the situation was 6-7 years ago in Greece)

+1 : if you can program and you're not in IT, you have an unfair advantage on the rest in most fields. EG. Starting a simple mailing when you're in sales, a client orientated blog, ...

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