With inflation, $120K is $165K in today's dollars - that is the pay necessary to keep up with inflation. To have the same buying power in 2016 you need to make that much more - today.
Yes, I understand that. And someone who was making $120k in 2000 and hasn't let their career stagnate should have no problem making over $165k now. I'm a software developer who was making $40k in 2006 when I started, did a horrible job of curating my career until 2010, and I'm only one more poach away from making about $165k in the Midwest an hour outside of the closest major city.
The software developers in their late 40's and 50's that I know who decided to advance their career instead of keeping the same job role are making much closer to if not above $200k now. The rest decided to stay as senior developers and make closer to $150k. Add 25-50% to these salaries if you are talking about Manhattan or Valley salaries.
Just because you were not able to keep up with industry doesn't mean there aren't a lot of senior engineers / architects making or exceeding $165k in this industry.
Secondly, you missed the point entirely. The fact that pay is going down across the board shows that not only is there no shortage of workers but there is a surplus of workers. And couple that with the unnecessary H1-b program, pay is going to continue to decline.
You will need to come up with at least one reputable survey showing IT salaries are going down to make that assertion. The surveys my company uses show IT salaries going up just under 7%, and the Dice survey here shows closer to 8%. Whatever the real number is, it is not negative. That doesn't mean 100% of IT workers are seeing 7-8% salary increases, but it does mean a significant increase for most of the IT workforce.
Hardly. Considering the ridiculous work schedules we have to deal with in this profession and having to be on call 24/7, we all should be making that as our starting pay. But since there are plenty of workers, there is downward pressure on pay.
Save the sob story. My father (farmer) and uncle (construction) had tough jobs. Occasionally having the work all nighters at a desk in an air conditioned or heated office is not slave labor. If you are really working 70+ hour weeks regularly then you are being taken advantage of by a crappy employer. Either leave now or grow your skillsets if you are having trouble finding other work. There are plenty of employers out there for skilled IT workers.
And if you really think there are plenty of skilled IT workers out there, you have obviously not had to hire for any position above mid-level tech support.
I was making $120,000 back in 2000 - that's $165,000 in today's dollars. That same job in the same area pays about $70,000 these days for an American; less for a H1-b. But I guess C++ programming is an outdated skill./s
If you were making that much money 16 years ago, you were either grossly overpaid or in a fairly senior role. Fast forward 16 years, if you were concerned with career advancement you should be a VP / Director / etc by now and making well north of $165k per year. But if you didn't want to increase your level of responsibility why would you assume your pay would increase much faster than inflation?
Similarly. I shoveled snow, delivered papers and helped neighbors clean out their barns/garages to save up and buy a C64. My parents hated computers. My dad was constantly telling me to get off the thing and do *real* work. Even with the school bullying and the lack of dates -- I never quit. Somehow all of this has changed? Now people need constant encouragement, no bullying, financial incentive, etc and even then, it's still a struggle to keep people interested.
No one is saying it is impossible for people to pick up interests even when they are actively or passively discouraged. It is simply less likely. Encouraging your kids to be interested in difficult subjects (like STEM) makes it more likely they will find them interesting themselves.
The argument is the world needs many more STEM workers in the next 30 years than it needed in the last 30 years. So raising our kids the same way our parents raised us (I'm a parent in my 30's for context) is not a very good methodology.
It's so funny when people are forced by the courts to maintain their life insurance policy after a divorce, with their ex the named beneficiary. Now THAT is a losing game.
Life insurance is basically a bet that you personally will never collect on.
If you have a court order to pay child or spousal support, it only makes sense you would be required to have a life insurance policy to protect that support. It saves you money on support if you pay the premiums instead of your ex-spouse, since your spouse would have to claim the support as income and pay taxes on it. So you have the choice of paying a $100 premium yourself or increasing your support by $125 to cover the extra needless taxes.
Self driving cars also still need insurance; just not as much.
That is currently an unproven assumption. Possibly correct but also possibly quite wrong. It presumes that self driving cars will actually be safer than human driven cars which has yet to be established conclusively. It seems reasonable and probable but that isn't the same thing as evidence. If they do prove to be safer in real world usage then you are almost certainly right.
I only stated that assumption as a given since it is the scenario car insurance companies need to be preparing for. Most likely we will not have self-driving cars until they are significantly safer than humans. So if self driving cars become a reality, it is very reasonable to assume they will be safer than human drivers today. If that never happens, this conversation is moot since there is no upheaval to worry about.
The article is identifying an obvious problem (insurance industry upheaval from ride sharing and driver-less cars) but providing grossly incorrect insights and details about the problem. Car insurance will not go away because of ride sharing or driver-less cars. No one rational is claiming this. But each of these new realities brings a unique problem.
Ride sharing shifts the insurance to the owner of the ride sharing car, instead of each individual rider. The number of miles driven won't go down (significantly), but the number of people being marketed to will. This is probably a good thing for the large insurance companies as they move from B2C to B2B, but individual insurance salesmen will be drastically hurt.
Self driving cars also still need insurance; just not as much. And a large portion of the insurance burden will fall to manufacturers instead of just on drivers. Insurance companies will not be able to make the same kind of profit overall on large multinational car companies that they can on the public.
So the insurance companies will still be there, but its not unreasonable to think they could be half the size or smaller. Or at least their automotive division would be.
Well in this case the reason is fairly obvious. Since the question asked about the long run, it is safe to assume machines which can comprehend natural language will be used to obfuscate text in the long run. Once that happens, I would assume obfuscation will easily win. It could not only win, but it could almost certainly be able to produce false positives.
This all depends on what their actual prediction is, which I don't think is very clear even after reading the article. All it really says is they will remain major players in the industry for the foreseeable future. It is so broad, unspecific (and useless) that it will almost certainly come to pass.
Very few companies of their size just go away. At worst one of them could be bought out by a rival, but I doubt their brand name would ever be discarded. If the prediction was that all 5 of these companies would be among the 10 most influential tech companies 20 years from now, that would be the kind of silly prediction you are referring to. But will some people still be employed by all five of these companies in 20 years? That prediction will probably pan out.
Sorting may be interesting to you, but it's dry and rather abstract.
I completely agree. Sorting and doing string manipulation may be important things to learn, but they won't inspire passion in the kids. And in high school I assume your goal is to get them interested in the subject not just provide job training.
My first programs in grade school were tic-tac-toe and various text based dungeon crawler games. These got me interested in the field. I learned sorting and string manipulation to solve other problems, they were not the goal themselves.
This article singles out a few companies, but are there any companies which produce mobile devices who are not as involved as Apply, Samsung, and Sony?
This guy actually takes the time to provide the most informative posts for the article, and this is your response? I'm not saying I agree with everything the tractor manufacturers are doing, but he has at least laid out some very interesting factors to consider.
What I do know is the massive productivity enhancements new tractors and combines give to farmers (my dad is a farmer), and new electronic systems are a main driver of that. If America still wants its dollar menus and steak meals under $20, we cannot keep using the same machinery my dad did when he started farming 50 years ago.
It is very upsetting that all three candidates gave very wishy washy answers on this topic. Although to be honest they are just politicians so these answers are probably simply the ones their focus groups said alienated the least voters.
But the summary is reading too much into Hillary's comments. The moderators simply called Clinton out on her bullshit answer, and she made that last comment to save face. It was just another lie to cover for the lies in her other lies.
It's not that it can't be done, it's that it can't be done subjectively. I actually find it hard to believe you're equating creativity with brand loyalty, are you for real?
Also, I'm an academic, so much for your presumptive "anti-intellectual" bullshit.
I assume you meant objectively, but considering the rest of your comments I'm leaning towards not giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Do you think educators are immune to all cognitive biases or irrational behavior? Your comment is kind of like when a woman thinks she can't have unconscious biases against women because of her gender. I think it is quite possible for academics to show anti-intellectual behavior, especially when faced with arguments that challenge their beliefs.
Your knee jerk reaction that the study is ridiculous because it attempted to measure something subjective is far more telling of your biases than your profession. Including your affinity for the authority bias. Also thinking that you cannot equate aspects of one concept with another because they are not 100% equal is also quite informative. You may still be very good at research in your field of study, or educating if that is your focus, but your propensity towards thinking yourself an absolute authority on what is bullshit and ridiculous make me question your rational thinking. Or perhaps you are just a hot head who is easily rattled and offended, and that negative impacts your thinking.
I just hope if and when you act as an advisor to students you are a bit more open minded. There are plenty of ways to measure subjective things.
I was going to say the same thing. Ridiculous. These "studies" get more and more ridiculous every year.
One byproduct of the anti-intellectual problem in our society is that people begin to confuse very hard tasks with impossible tasks. It just makes it easier if you don't want to think hard and instead can just claim something cannot be done.
Your comments remind me of people who think you cannot quantify the value of brand loyalty or customer satisfaction. Luckily the data analytics industry can still move forward while uncreative people dismiss their efforts.
This is why smart is overrated when hiring productive programming teams. Most jobs don't need creative, they just need to be done.
That is why the 'As' hire 'As' and 'Bs' hire 'Cs' theory is crap. With 'As' as managers you will have no schedule (e.g. Google).
The secret is to convince the 'As' to work for the 'Bs' (or as I like to say convince the assholes to put up with the bullshit).
I used to think you needed a large number of worker bees to complement the highly skilled creative workers. But after almost two decades in the industry, I find that if you actually take the effort to hire As, they do their work well enough that you don't have many mundane tasks best done by C workers.
The trick is actually hiring A workers, not Bs who think they are As. This may be particularly common in IT since so few people understand the IT industry it can be hard to hire well if you don't have a large IT department.
Yeah but unfortunately you become notorious around the office as a habitual procrastinator. And that's no good for your perf review. Word spreads around that this guy procrastinates but just happens to get lucky that some of his tasks were later deemed unnecessary.
This strategy only works if you really are one of the top performers. It all depends on how much your employer values your time. If he just views you as someone to hand mindless tasks to, then he will not look kindly on procrastinating. If your employer values your highly, he will like that you are self-managing your time properly and getting the most important tasks done instead of being distracted.
My reputation around work is you come to me with your most important problems, because they will get fixed. But if you come to me with mundane tasks, they are unlikely to ever get done (although I'll probably help you find someone else to do it). I like this reputation, and based on my last decade of performance reviews, pay raises, and promotions, my employers like it too.
I read the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish article on Wikipedia looking for examples of this actually happening, and it had to go back 15 years to find an example. I think you need to find new things to complain about.
With stunts like this, Linux is going to win by default. Unless you really like throwing away old but perfectly-capable computers just because a new copy of Windows comes out, the only other use is to reformat the disk and put Linux on it. Relatively few common tasks other than graphics-intensive ones (games and rendering work) are beneath the abilities of machines 10 years old or more. If you have an OS that still works with the hardware.
I think this announcement is stupid too, but you do realize it doesn't say Windows won't work on older hardware right? It means older Windows versions won't work as well on newer hardware. It is the exact opposite of the problem you are claiming. What everyone here is worried about is being forced to upgrade Windows every time they upgrade their processor.
I completely agree that the way doctors are paid is broken. Doctor incentives are one major reason why EMR systems are disliked (not the only reason, EMR vendors have a huge responsibility too).
This is why we need organizations like the FED to set up ways for doctors to either be paid based on results or at least have public ratings based on results. And for that to ever happen we need the FED to mandate EMR systems because otherwise we have a chicken or the egg problem (not enough data without EMR to have accurate ratings).
As a physician I Use an EHR, for each click I wait 10 seconds. do the math.
Then you need much better EHR software. An EHR is not a complicated piece of software, it is mostly data entry. It needs to be more heavily tested than most software, but it usually isn't doing anything algorithmically complex. There is no excuse for response times above perhaps a tenth of a second for anything but reporting or search features. I have developed EHR and patient monitoring software and have never seen response times like you mention.
This is another attempt by the Feds to become involved in things which generally do not make any sense.
Improving intercommunication between hospitals and doctors throughout the country seems to be the exact type of thing the Feds should be involved in. Perhaps their implementation so far has been poor, but they certainly shouldn't stop trying. If the medical industry was self governing well and communication between doctors was easy, then the Feds wouldn't need to get involved. But communications standards in the medical industry are abhorrent.
They did not go for phase 2 and phase 3, since there were a bunch of additional requirements that they did not believe would add anything to patient outcome.
This is why better metrics are needed, because who knows if your parents are correct in this assessment. If Ford asked people what they want they would have asked for a faster horse, and likewise asking doctors whether improved documentation is helpful for overall public health is not nearly sufficient. A good start perhaps but their view of the problem is far too narrow to be ultimately relied upon.
What he's saying is doctors are spending 2 hours out of an 8 hour shift working with their EMRs, and his point is that is 25% of the time the doctor is not seeing patients.
So what? I spend far less than 50% of my time physically typing software code (as a software developer). The rest of my time is spent in design meetings, user requirement discovery, project management tasks, etc. That is not wasted time. If I spent 100% of my time typing code the quality of my work would take a nose dive.
Maybe doctors spending 25% of their time keeping good records is too much time. Maybe it is far too little. Nothing in the article shows these people have any idea either. I guess there is no way to know if it was poor reporting or clueless interviewees. But absolutely nothing in the article demonstrates anyone has any idea if these EMRs are actually helping or hurting doctor performance. Its just a bunch of anecdotes from annoyed doctors and meaningless statistics that give the illusion they are doing their job.
I am not claiming they are wrong about EMR systems hurting the industry. I have no idea. But their choice of comments used to back up their claims gives me near 0% confidence they have any idea how to improve the system.
Slashdot Mirror
With inflation, $120K is $165K in today's dollars - that is the pay necessary to keep up with inflation. To have the same buying power in 2016 you need to make that much more - today.
Yes, I understand that. And someone who was making $120k in 2000 and hasn't let their career stagnate should have no problem making over $165k now. I'm a software developer who was making $40k in 2006 when I started, did a horrible job of curating my career until 2010, and I'm only one more poach away from making about $165k in the Midwest an hour outside of the closest major city.
The software developers in their late 40's and 50's that I know who decided to advance their career instead of keeping the same job role are making much closer to if not above $200k now. The rest decided to stay as senior developers and make closer to $150k. Add 25-50% to these salaries if you are talking about Manhattan or Valley salaries.
Just because you were not able to keep up with industry doesn't mean there aren't a lot of senior engineers / architects making or exceeding $165k in this industry.
Secondly, you missed the point entirely. The fact that pay is going down across the board shows that not only is there no shortage of workers but there is a surplus of workers. And couple that with the unnecessary H1-b program, pay is going to continue to decline.
You will need to come up with at least one reputable survey showing IT salaries are going down to make that assertion. The surveys my company uses show IT salaries going up just under 7%, and the Dice survey here shows closer to 8%. Whatever the real number is, it is not negative. That doesn't mean 100% of IT workers are seeing 7-8% salary increases, but it does mean a significant increase for most of the IT workforce.
Hardly. Considering the ridiculous work schedules we have to deal with in this profession and having to be on call 24/7, we all should be making that as our starting pay. But since there are plenty of workers, there is downward pressure on pay.
Save the sob story. My father (farmer) and uncle (construction) had tough jobs. Occasionally having the work all nighters at a desk in an air conditioned or heated office is not slave labor. If you are really working 70+ hour weeks regularly then you are being taken advantage of by a crappy employer. Either leave now or grow your skillsets if you are having trouble finding other work. There are plenty of employers out there for skilled IT workers.
And if you really think there are plenty of skilled IT workers out there, you have obviously not had to hire for any position above mid-level tech support.
I was making $120,000 back in 2000 - that's $165,000 in today's dollars. That same job in the same area pays about $70,000 these days for an American; less for a H1-b. But I guess C++ programming is an outdated skill. /s
If you were making that much money 16 years ago, you were either grossly overpaid or in a fairly senior role. Fast forward 16 years, if you were concerned with career advancement you should be a VP / Director / etc by now and making well north of $165k per year. But if you didn't want to increase your level of responsibility why would you assume your pay would increase much faster than inflation?
Similarly. I shoveled snow, delivered papers and helped neighbors clean out their barns/garages to save up and buy a C64. My parents hated computers. My dad was constantly telling me to get off the thing and do *real* work. Even with the school bullying and the lack of dates -- I never quit. Somehow all of this has changed? Now people need constant encouragement, no bullying, financial incentive, etc and even then, it's still a struggle to keep people interested.
No one is saying it is impossible for people to pick up interests even when they are actively or passively discouraged. It is simply less likely. Encouraging your kids to be interested in difficult subjects (like STEM) makes it more likely they will find them interesting themselves.
The argument is the world needs many more STEM workers in the next 30 years than it needed in the last 30 years. So raising our kids the same way our parents raised us (I'm a parent in my 30's for context) is not a very good methodology.
True, but this is less than 1% of the population, so shouldn't really be a legislate standard.
But generally this top 1% shows what the next 50% will be doing 5 years from now.
Sorry, spousal support is taxable income. I didn't have a child during my divorce so I didn't realize child support is different.
It's so funny when people are forced by the courts to maintain their life insurance policy after a divorce, with their ex the named beneficiary. Now THAT is a losing game.
Life insurance is basically a bet that you personally will never collect on.
If you have a court order to pay child or spousal support, it only makes sense you would be required to have a life insurance policy to protect that support. It saves you money on support if you pay the premiums instead of your ex-spouse, since your spouse would have to claim the support as income and pay taxes on it. So you have the choice of paying a $100 premium yourself or increasing your support by $125 to cover the extra needless taxes.
Self driving cars also still need insurance; just not as much.
That is currently an unproven assumption. Possibly correct but also possibly quite wrong. It presumes that self driving cars will actually be safer than human driven cars which has yet to be established conclusively. It seems reasonable and probable but that isn't the same thing as evidence. If they do prove to be safer in real world usage then you are almost certainly right.
I only stated that assumption as a given since it is the scenario car insurance companies need to be preparing for. Most likely we will not have self-driving cars until they are significantly safer than humans. So if self driving cars become a reality, it is very reasonable to assume they will be safer than human drivers today. If that never happens, this conversation is moot since there is no upheaval to worry about.
Ive been paying for insurance for 20+ years... never once had an accident.
Total waste of money.
I've been paying for life insurance for the past 10+ years ... never once died.
Total waste of money.
The article is identifying an obvious problem (insurance industry upheaval from ride sharing and driver-less cars) but providing grossly incorrect insights and details about the problem. Car insurance will not go away because of ride sharing or driver-less cars. No one rational is claiming this. But each of these new realities brings a unique problem.
Ride sharing shifts the insurance to the owner of the ride sharing car, instead of each individual rider. The number of miles driven won't go down (significantly), but the number of people being marketed to will. This is probably a good thing for the large insurance companies as they move from B2C to B2B, but individual insurance salesmen will be drastically hurt.
Self driving cars also still need insurance; just not as much. And a large portion of the insurance burden will fall to manufacturers instead of just on drivers. Insurance companies will not be able to make the same kind of profit overall on large multinational car companies that they can on the public.
So the insurance companies will still be there, but its not unreasonable to think they could be half the size or smaller. Or at least their automotive division would be.
Well in this case the reason is fairly obvious. Since the question asked about the long run, it is safe to assume machines which can comprehend natural language will be used to obfuscate text in the long run. Once that happens, I would assume obfuscation will easily win. It could not only win, but it could almost certainly be able to produce false positives.
This all depends on what their actual prediction is, which I don't think is very clear even after reading the article. All it really says is they will remain major players in the industry for the foreseeable future. It is so broad, unspecific (and useless) that it will almost certainly come to pass.
Very few companies of their size just go away. At worst one of them could be bought out by a rival, but I doubt their brand name would ever be discarded. If the prediction was that all 5 of these companies would be among the 10 most influential tech companies 20 years from now, that would be the kind of silly prediction you are referring to. But will some people still be employed by all five of these companies in 20 years? That prediction will probably pan out.
Sorting may be interesting to you, but it's dry and rather abstract.
I completely agree. Sorting and doing string manipulation may be important things to learn, but they won't inspire passion in the kids. And in high school I assume your goal is to get them interested in the subject not just provide job training.
My first programs in grade school were tic-tac-toe and various text based dungeon crawler games. These got me interested in the field. I learned sorting and string manipulation to solve other problems, they were not the goal themselves.
This article singles out a few companies, but are there any companies which produce mobile devices who are not as involved as Apply, Samsung, and Sony?
go fuck yourself
This guy actually takes the time to provide the most informative posts for the article, and this is your response? I'm not saying I agree with everything the tractor manufacturers are doing, but he has at least laid out some very interesting factors to consider.
What I do know is the massive productivity enhancements new tractors and combines give to farmers (my dad is a farmer), and new electronic systems are a main driver of that. If America still wants its dollar menus and steak meals under $20, we cannot keep using the same machinery my dad did when he started farming 50 years ago.
It is very upsetting that all three candidates gave very wishy washy answers on this topic. Although to be honest they are just politicians so these answers are probably simply the ones their focus groups said alienated the least voters.
But the summary is reading too much into Hillary's comments. The moderators simply called Clinton out on her bullshit answer, and she made that last comment to save face. It was just another lie to cover for the lies in her other lies.
It's not that it can't be done, it's that it can't be done subjectively. I actually find it hard to believe you're equating creativity with brand loyalty, are you for real?
Also, I'm an academic, so much for your presumptive "anti-intellectual" bullshit.
I assume you meant objectively, but considering the rest of your comments I'm leaning towards not giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Do you think educators are immune to all cognitive biases or irrational behavior? Your comment is kind of like when a woman thinks she can't have unconscious biases against women because of her gender. I think it is quite possible for academics to show anti-intellectual behavior, especially when faced with arguments that challenge their beliefs.
Your knee jerk reaction that the study is ridiculous because it attempted to measure something subjective is far more telling of your biases than your profession. Including your affinity for the authority bias. Also thinking that you cannot equate aspects of one concept with another because they are not 100% equal is also quite informative. You may still be very good at research in your field of study, or educating if that is your focus, but your propensity towards thinking yourself an absolute authority on what is bullshit and ridiculous make me question your rational thinking. Or perhaps you are just a hot head who is easily rattled and offended, and that negative impacts your thinking.
I just hope if and when you act as an advisor to students you are a bit more open minded. There are plenty of ways to measure subjective things.
I was going to say the same thing. Ridiculous. These "studies" get more and more ridiculous every year.
One byproduct of the anti-intellectual problem in our society is that people begin to confuse very hard tasks with impossible tasks. It just makes it easier if you don't want to think hard and instead can just claim something cannot be done.
Your comments remind me of people who think you cannot quantify the value of brand loyalty or customer satisfaction. Luckily the data analytics industry can still move forward while uncreative people dismiss their efforts.
This is why smart is overrated when hiring productive programming teams. Most jobs don't need creative, they just need to be done.
That is why the 'As' hire 'As' and 'Bs' hire 'Cs' theory is crap. With 'As' as managers you will have no schedule (e.g. Google).
The secret is to convince the 'As' to work for the 'Bs' (or as I like to say convince the assholes to put up with the bullshit).
I used to think you needed a large number of worker bees to complement the highly skilled creative workers. But after almost two decades in the industry, I find that if you actually take the effort to hire As, they do their work well enough that you don't have many mundane tasks best done by C workers.
The trick is actually hiring A workers, not Bs who think they are As. This may be particularly common in IT since so few people understand the IT industry it can be hard to hire well if you don't have a large IT department.
Yeah but unfortunately you become notorious around the office as a habitual procrastinator. And that's no good for your perf review. Word spreads around that this guy procrastinates but just happens to get lucky that some of his tasks were later deemed unnecessary.
This strategy only works if you really are one of the top performers. It all depends on how much your employer values your time. If he just views you as someone to hand mindless tasks to, then he will not look kindly on procrastinating. If your employer values your highly, he will like that you are self-managing your time properly and getting the most important tasks done instead of being distracted.
My reputation around work is you come to me with your most important problems, because they will get fixed. But if you come to me with mundane tasks, they are unlikely to ever get done (although I'll probably help you find someone else to do it). I like this reputation, and based on my last decade of performance reviews, pay raises, and promotions, my employers like it too.
Embrace, Extend Extinguish
'nuf said.
I read the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish article on Wikipedia looking for examples of this actually happening, and it had to go back 15 years to find an example. I think you need to find new things to complain about.
With stunts like this, Linux is going to win by default. Unless you really like throwing away old but perfectly-capable computers just because a new copy of Windows comes out, the only other use is to reformat the disk and put Linux on it. Relatively few common tasks other than graphics-intensive ones (games and rendering work) are beneath the abilities of machines 10 years old or more. If you have an OS that still works with the hardware.
I think this announcement is stupid too, but you do realize it doesn't say Windows won't work on older hardware right? It means older Windows versions won't work as well on newer hardware. It is the exact opposite of the problem you are claiming. What everyone here is worried about is being forced to upgrade Windows every time they upgrade their processor.
I completely agree that the way doctors are paid is broken. Doctor incentives are one major reason why EMR systems are disliked (not the only reason, EMR vendors have a huge responsibility too).
This is why we need organizations like the FED to set up ways for doctors to either be paid based on results or at least have public ratings based on results. And for that to ever happen we need the FED to mandate EMR systems because otherwise we have a chicken or the egg problem (not enough data without EMR to have accurate ratings).
As a physician I Use an EHR, for each click I wait 10 seconds. do the math.
Then you need much better EHR software. An EHR is not a complicated piece of software, it is mostly data entry. It needs to be more heavily tested than most software, but it usually isn't doing anything algorithmically complex. There is no excuse for response times above perhaps a tenth of a second for anything but reporting or search features. I have developed EHR and patient monitoring software and have never seen response times like you mention.
This is another attempt by the Feds to become involved in things which generally do not make any sense.
Improving intercommunication between hospitals and doctors throughout the country seems to be the exact type of thing the Feds should be involved in. Perhaps their implementation so far has been poor, but they certainly shouldn't stop trying. If the medical industry was self governing well and communication between doctors was easy, then the Feds wouldn't need to get involved. But communications standards in the medical industry are abhorrent.
They did not go for phase 2 and phase 3, since there were a bunch of additional requirements that they did not believe would add anything to patient outcome.
This is why better metrics are needed, because who knows if your parents are correct in this assessment. If Ford asked people what they want they would have asked for a faster horse, and likewise asking doctors whether improved documentation is helpful for overall public health is not nearly sufficient. A good start perhaps but their view of the problem is far too narrow to be ultimately relied upon.
What he's saying is doctors are spending 2 hours out of an 8 hour shift working with their EMRs, and his point is that is 25% of the time the doctor is not seeing patients.
So what? I spend far less than 50% of my time physically typing software code (as a software developer). The rest of my time is spent in design meetings, user requirement discovery, project management tasks, etc. That is not wasted time. If I spent 100% of my time typing code the quality of my work would take a nose dive.
Maybe doctors spending 25% of their time keeping good records is too much time. Maybe it is far too little. Nothing in the article shows these people have any idea either. I guess there is no way to know if it was poor reporting or clueless interviewees. But absolutely nothing in the article demonstrates anyone has any idea if these EMRs are actually helping or hurting doctor performance. Its just a bunch of anecdotes from annoyed doctors and meaningless statistics that give the illusion they are doing their job.
I am not claiming they are wrong about EMR systems hurting the industry. I have no idea. But their choice of comments used to back up their claims gives me near 0% confidence they have any idea how to improve the system.