Wrongful termination is a no-go. I talked to a literal slew of lawyers. The amount I'd be looking to recover would be probably the cost of court. Also chump change compared to my overall income, so not worth my time.
Now, as far as media - no one died, no one was greatly impacted - probably not very interesting, and very technical. There was an outage for a day, records of a couple of hours of data (5-10 patient visits) was lost.
Now, as far a "higher up the food chain" - I got a rant here about my 20+ years of experience in corporate america. The guy up the food chain took a chance (saved money on salaries) by hiring a manager of an 18 person team, who has literally had 3 years of work experience. That was a bad decision. He (my boss's boss) doesn't want his boss, (my boss's boss's boss), to see this bad decision. So he's going to protect her until someone dies and he throws her under the bus. This is just a fact of life.
I've been at several hospitals over many years. All the IT people care greatly about patient care. The management is willing to have deaths on their hand to shave a day off a project. Management at hospitals are people who shouldn't be allowed near medical care. The higher up the chain you go, the closer you get to the money, the closer you get to the purpose of the hospital: pretend you're losing money while underpaying and overworking staff, and scamming sick people.
Think about it: you are a supplier. Your demand curve is inelastic. Your customers don't know the price before they buy. Now, what kind of people is this type of corporation going to attract? The worst of the worst.
I would be curious to know from your learnings where you think engineers/product people should head to be fullfilled in such environments as I am starting to be clueless. Thanks
You can do delivery for stuff medical companies buy (delivery/residencies/support) and your experience on the customer side will add big bucks to the salary the vendor pays you. Hospitals use AIX, they run EPIC on it. IBM will pay you more if you can go to hospitals that buy from them and help them set up AIX for EPIC. If you do storage like I do, those hospitals buy EMC/IBM storage, and medical applications need specific layout, path and disk group separation, etc - if you know those, EMC/IBM will pay you more. Your "customer" at this point is the IT staff at the hospital, and they're good guys and a pleasure to work with.
If you want even more money, again go for a vendor or a VAR, but do presales engineering. One downside to that, those toxic unethical managers are now your customer. But they'll pay you a lot, and you won't be asked to attempt killing people with a script by making an xray disappear from a display during surgery.
Both options are good, I've done and do both. If you work for a VAR instead of a vendor, you get the same salary as the vendor, but you also get spiffs from the vendor. I average about $5k/month in spiffs when I do presales engineering. But you feel a bit like a used car salesman - the spiffs are bigger when you sell what the vendor is pushing instead of the best solution.
So in short - all depends on how "straight-edge" you are, and how comfortable you are being around bs. the worse the smell, the more cash in your pocket unfortunately. I personally have screwed large corporations out of millions to end up with tens of thousands extra in my pocket. And that's something I don't like, but am comfortable with - as opposed to damaging individual people. If you are completely ethical, more power to you. Go work for VMware or Nasuni or something on the delivery side, tell them you know a bunch of medical applications, and they'll pay you more.
As ballpark, the current ceilings from my personal experience (storage), the total income including bonus and spiffs are: 150k delivery engineer for a vendor, 140k delivery engineer for a VAR, 180k vendor presales engineer, 200-250k pse at a VAR (because of spiffs). In cali or nyc, add about 10% to those. personal fulfillment is on the delivery side, monetary is in presales.
One family in particular funded a lot of the push to implement "Right to work" - the AmWay owning DeVos's.
Let me give a clearer example. Your boss tells you "shoot that old lady or you're fired." you refuse, he fires you. You can sue him, you will win, it has nothing to do with right to work or not. In my case it was asking me things to endanger patients, and refusing to put the request in writing so there's a record of it.
The issue with that is it's a civil suit, in court, and your law firm is now fighting a huge corporation for the amount equivalent to a couple of months' salary. It's not worth it in most cases, and they know that. But if you want to break even, and the huge amount of time and added stress of the lawsuit is worth revenge - not cash - absolutely do it, and punish those assholes. Except they're not really punished. The payout disappears in a database and becomes a rounding error somewhere, and the management responsible never gets punished. They don't have the stress and time waste of the lawsuit - there are zero consequences to them, and it's yet more loss to you.
Unless you're willing to find a lawyer who'll just take part of the settlement if you win and guarantee you it won't take up a lot of your time. I contacted a bunch of attorneys, and that was a no-go. Contrary to popular belief, getting the guilty party to pay the attorney bills of the winner almost never happens in real life. Even if you get awarded those costs (doubtful) - they will simply refuse to pay. You can then show up and take their office furniture and put it on ebay.
