I guess it's really just the same everywhere...
So my volunteer gig right now is at the Center for Interventional Vascular Therapy at the Columbia University Medical Center. The cardiologists here do thousands upon thousands of angioplasties and stent placements every year, and at any given time there's a dozen clinical trials or research studies going on, usually with new and improved materials or drug-eluting stents. Within the center there is a group responsible for maintaining a database of outcomes for each procedure, including details on the procedure and followups for years, and this is the group that I'm attached to.
As is the case almost everywhere, no one understands the complexity of the technology required to run something like this cleanly. The poor data manager, an intensive care nurse who did a masters degree in nursing informatics, is totally overwhelmed - since he's "the database guy," people expect him to be a programmer, a system administrator, a networking guru, a database administrator, a study expert, and a saint all at the same time. The amazing thing is that he somehow has been handling this responsibility - but he just got offered a job managing a database for a group with a tenth of the records, and he jumped at the chance. So now the group is scrambling to figure out how to replace him, and it simply cannot be done - he literally does the work of 4 people.
And so yet again, I've returned to the land of poor requirements, next to no documentation, shotgun-inspired development, testing in production, and "oh shit, that should have been the other release, we need to spend the weekend cleaning up that data." A part of me is tempted to show the hiring manager my full software pedigree, and ask to run the show. The other part knows better than to get involved waist-deep in a sinking ship, and understands that I've left that life behind. It still doesn't stop me from secretly fixing bugs when I come across them, though. ;)
More scary than this, though, is the fact that one of the superstars in my program, a second year trying to link to Brown (just like I want to) got rejected. This process is such a fucking crapshoot sometimes.
As is the case almost everywhere, no one understands the complexity of the technology required to run something like this cleanly. The poor data manager, an intensive care nurse who did a masters degree in nursing informatics, is totally overwhelmed - since he's "the database guy," people expect him to be a programmer, a system administrator, a networking guru, a database administrator, a study expert, and a saint all at the same time. The amazing thing is that he somehow has been handling this responsibility - but he just got offered a job managing a database for a group with a tenth of the records, and he jumped at the chance. So now the group is scrambling to figure out how to replace him, and it simply cannot be done - he literally does the work of 4 people.
And so yet again, I've returned to the land of poor requirements, next to no documentation, shotgun-inspired development, testing in production, and "oh shit, that should have been the other release, we need to spend the weekend cleaning up that data." A part of me is tempted to show the hiring manager my full software pedigree, and ask to run the show. The other part knows better than to get involved waist-deep in a sinking ship, and understands that I've left that life behind. It still doesn't stop me from secretly fixing bugs when I come across them, though. ;)
More scary than this, though, is the fact that one of the superstars in my program, a second year trying to link to Brown (just like I want to) got rejected. This process is such a fucking crapshoot sometimes.