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0 pointsjorvi1y ago0 comments

I have had the (dis)pleasure of watching my 60yr old mother having to re-learn the entire administrative part of her healthcare job three times over and deeply struggle because the insurance suits decided a new software package was needed.

Nothing humbles you more as a dev than seeing a layman struggle through an interface, getting increasingly frustrated and desperate because she can’t find the button she needs due to complexity and sensory overload due to a million tabs, buttons and text fields.

The worst of it is, you can see that she knows what she wants to do, but can’t translate that into the steps needed to get the computer to “understand” that, effectively making it feel as if it is trying to sabotage her. Something that would have taken 20 minutes with pen & paper suddenly takes 40 minutes digitally. Weren’t computers supposed to make us more efficient?

Considerately, screw your attitude. Eat some humble pie.

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treyd1y ago

Both of your and the parent's points are true at the same time.

SanderNL1y ago

This anti-learning attitude is common, but I don’t find it admirable.

To me this is like a dev saying “screw Git, I just want to do console.log(). All this complexity is sabotaging my productivity.”

Modern jobs, even health care, require learning about and managing complexity. It’s not just “taking care of people”. Throwing your hands up and saying “I’m old”, which is a lousy excuse because I know plenty able old people and completely digitally illiterate young people, is not a viable solution.

Now, whether we want that as a society is another topic. But for the foreseeable future adapting to complexity and actually taking the time to sit down and learn this shit is IMO the only way forwards.

wakeupcall1y ago

This is not anti-learning. This would be akin to git changing command names and flags doing exactly the same stuff. After a couple of times happening, even if the changes are somewhat ok, you too would start to be frustrated.

I've seen healthcare management software evolution due to my partner working with it. As in the worst management story, it's pitched to a boss that doesn't need or want to use it, offered to generally the lowest bidder, and then immediately outsourced in parts that rarely work well together taking years to develop.

The UI and workflows are designed by people that will never use it and are just plainly bad. The software/UI takes years to stabilize and reach feature parity to the same level it was before. During that time, it's pretty common to see staff having to use both systems and perform double data entry.

You're not learning to improve anything here. You're substituting a [shitty] tool with another one which does _exactly_ the same.

Sadly in IT this is pretty common. There's nothing special about healthcare.

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