3 ms·

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

by leonth 12y ago

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.]

NicoJuicy 12y ago
+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, ...
atmosx 12y ago
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?
- leonth 12y ago
  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 :)
  - atmosx 12y ago
    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).
- e12e 12y ago
  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).

by leonth 12y ago

NicoJuicy 12y ago

+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, ...

atmosx 12y ago

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?

leonth 12y ago
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 :)
- atmosx 12y ago
  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).
e12e 12y ago
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).