Outside the vacuum of technology (can it be done?), it seems to me that the role that policy plays when it comes to the actual rollout of self-driving cars (should it be done and how?) is vastly underrated. This seems to be the real bottleneck in mass adoption - improvements in technology will have diminishing returns after a certain point.
For example, things like getting companies to agree to a unified standard at a government/industry level & determining frameworks for liability all seem to be as important (and perhaps difficult) as eking out another 0.00001% increase in safety.
Like qudat said, the level of rules and regulations required to enter the market are indeed pretty high, but I don't think they are insurmountable. And industry connections certainly do help in getting contracts, but people will generally listen if you have good ideas.
The people making the purchasing decisions are almost always pretty removed from day-to-day usage of clinical software (and the bigger the company, the more true this is).
But how will you present to them that your new product is "better" than that of the incumbent's? You can say, "our product can do X feature 10x better than another product", but if they reply with "unless your product has dark mode for a select number of physicians who live in WA and NY state, it's going to be a no-go. We already have another quote from someone else who will do this for us", what are you going to do? You may resist at first, but in order to win the business, you too will likely repeat this process ad-nauseum, until your "MVP" becomes just a "VP".
These decision-makers are also cautious about "new" technology (and rightly so, for the most part). Since if something does go wrong with patient data, it is considered catastrophic - and who will be to blame then?
Dendi is a healthcare software company that is working on developing the next-generation clinical laboratory information systems (LIS).
We are a small and technical team. We are looking for startup-oriented Python developers to help us execute on our vision and take our product to the next level.
We are also looking for people who are comfortable with uncertainty and open-ended questions, as the position comes with a significant equity stake (cofounder level).
Preferred Qualifications:
- Native level of English proficiency, both verbal and written
- Bachelor’s degree in computing or a related field
- Advanced expertise with Python
- Experience with Django
- Experience in designing REST APIs
- Experience with SQL databases (PostgreSQL) and relational database design
- Experience with Linux
- Experience with healthcare or laboratory settings is a big bonus
The biggest issue is resentment, although I've personally gotten over it for the most part.
The key phrase of the article being "secret" - it took me until junior year of college to realize that the reason a lot of my classmates could eat out wherever they wanted and buy whatever clothes they wanted was due to their parents funding their lifestyle. In comparison, I struggled a lot in college financially (even on a full ride scholarship), as well as fitting in with my peers both academically and culturally.
When I had asked my friends how they were able to afford everything, they always told me that they had "money saved up", which I legitimately believed and never really questioned.
It really wasn't until I started working and my friends would reminisce about college that I realized that the "money saved up" was really their parents money. Then some of my friends started buying homes: they had "money saved up" and "invested wisely", they claimed, but this time I was wiser because we were working the same job at the same company, and I knew that they spent more money than me.
When I started my own company, some of my friends in the tech community said something along the lines of, "how much money are your parents gonna invest?" - which is the same kind of assumed privilege that left me feeling so bitter before. I've definitely grown out it since then and have taken steps to stop comparing myself to others as much, but it's human nature to do so and I think my story will ring true with a lot of people with similar backgrounds.
Ultimately, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but I did spend a lot of time saying no to a lot of things (as a result of not having time and/or money) and feeling inadequate as a result. And before anyone says I should "make better friends" - I think our own personal narratives are always biased to sound more self-sufficient than we actually are, so no, I don't blame anyone either.
I had the opposite experience. My father got laid off the year before I was to enter college. Because of the way financial aid worked at the time, it looked back at three years of parental income. He was cashing out his retirement to keep paying the mortgage and buy groceries, but on paper we were too "rich" to qualify for any financial aid. I worked a full time job and enrolled at a community college at night. I paid my own way and worked hard. I never said no to anything and would travel to remote sites if they needed someone to go. I never took out a school loan.
I moved cities for an awesome job and moved in with my best friend from high school. He was on his second year in an engineering program at a major university. I was working full time and going to community college classes at night, while he worked part time and was living on financial aid and loans. I was incredibly jealous. He would go out drinking every night, always had cash to do whatever he wanted, had a nice car, took amazing vacations and I can't tell you how many times I would wake up and see a different girl who spent the night.
Later on, when I looked at my peers who were buying houses and nice cars, I had assumed they were doing better than me, had better jobs, or had help. Nope. They were up to their eyeballs in debt. Some lost jobs and lost everything. My best friend ended up moving away after a suicide attempt and never heard what happened to him.
Lastly, I decided to go back to school for a second degree in electrical engineering. Not because I needed, but because I wanted the challenge. I had to retake some lower level courses that didn't transfer. Overhearing young adults complain about not having time to do anything, school is so hard, and then talking about the party where they smoked pot all night is just cringe-worthy.
You shouldn't feel inadequate at all. I certainly don't.
Who I am to judge what innovations are useful or useless to society? In a sense, one could very well argue that the market cap or valuation of a company is at least a decent proxy for "usefulness".
With that said, however, my personal opinion is different. Although I think innovation of any kind is great for society, what I'm frustrated by is the relative mindshare of where we focus our attention on.
I like to use the term "farsighted" - many people in SV are able to see very far distances into the future, but ignore some of the immediate problems that are right under our noses. That's what I'm frustrated by.
One thing I've always found useful is asking the people I think of as having mis-allocated their attention. Very often they have good reasons for their decisions. It's surprisingly rare that they're actually ignoring the immediate problems right under their noses. It is very common that they don't share my assessment of what the resources they command could do if applied elsewhere, and understanding why is educational for me.
The other tool I find useful is to remember that my perception of where our collective mindshare is going is necessarily going to be less than fully informed. It can easily be quite far off the mark, leaving me thinking that a major problem is going completely unaddressed when there are in fact vast resources being directed at it without any visibility to me.
When you're focused on immediate problems that are right under your nose, you tend to produce solutions that are band aid solutions.
When you're more farsighted, you tend to look at the root cause of problems and try to find solutions that cure problems once and for all.
They do tend to take longer to come about, for sure. But which approach produces the most utility is very hard to prove. Is it better to equip people with mosquito nets, or to create better malaria vaccines?
We probably need both approaches in the end, but only having the immediate problem approach is guaranteed to lead to local maxima.
I don't think we have to think of it as a binary opinion. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) realizes that the supply of doctors is an issue - but anyone can already start a medical school (California Northstate, for example).
And to address your point about "awful doctors", people are also starting to realize the shortcomings of the previous system - filtering too heavily on test scores/grades, for example, meant that many medical schools churned out graduates with great test scores but relatively poor interpersonal skills (which is a travesty since you're dealing with people all day) for a while. Nothing is changing overnight, of course, so the jury is still out in how things will be in the next few decades.
Both the prices and costs of a hospital/clinic are very much politics-driven.
And the most infuriating part to all of this is that whether a system does well financially has little to do with patient outcomes or any other metric related to human health. Yes, I understand Goodhart's law ("when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") since it's a common counterpoint used against my argument, but surely there are better metrics to optimize for other than profit?
For example, I work closely with a medium-sized reference laboratory, and it's clear to me that they have to take literally every shortcut possible in order to survive. The only reason that they're able compete in the market at all against a LabCorp or a Quest is due to the fact that they have deep political connections (lobbyists, governors, lawyers, etc) - certainly not because they have a better product or have better testing methods (although if you asked them, that's what they'd tell you).
>The only reason that they're able compete in the market at all against a LabCorp or a Quest is due to the fact that they have deep political connections (lobbyists, governors, lawyers, etc) - certainly not because they have a better product or have better testing methods (although if you asked them, that's what they'd tell you).
The lack of transparency is due to perverse incentives in the healthcare system stemming from overly complex legislation.
As a country, the US hasn't decided whether healthcare is a fundamental right or privilege. As a result, we constantly make political decisions that straddle the line without ever really going one way.
The biggest culprit is the "fee-for-service" model of reimbursement, where healthcare providers (physicians) are reimbursed based on the quantity of care rather than patient outcomes. Each procedure has a code (CPT) that is used to bill insurance. Billing for each of these codes is completely arbitrary and up to provider/payer negotiations. The fee-for-service model is a clear example of a perverse incentive.
Who reimburses the fee-for-service model? Either the government (Medicare/Medicaid isn't even entirely government-run, as many states rely on a for-profit Medicare Administrative Contractor) or private health insurance companies. The perverse incentives can now be seen from both the provider's side and the payer's side: hospitals and physicians negotiate to get the best reimbursement rates that they can. And of course, because these insurance companies want to make money, they make it "difficult" for providers to get paid for each procedure and will find any reasonable way to deny the claim from going through. Because of this, providers artificially raise the amount charged to the payers as high as they think they can get away with in the hopes that insurance will pay up.
Meanwhile, patients suffer greatly as there's no transparency.
I cannot divulge my sources, so take it for what it is, but in talking with people at the top of several very large private insurers (as far back as 2016) they were sick of how providers weren't healing people and bleeding them out.
I've seen evidence (firsthand) that value based care can work, but it's hard to get provider networks on board when they are the ones who aren't getting paid when readmission rates are too high.
> The biggest culprit is the "fee-for-service" model of reimbursement, where healthcare providers (physicians) are reimbursed based on the quantity of care rather than patient outcomes.
Charge a hospital based on patient outcomes? How would that work?
Say getting a base ammount per problem fixed or identified to some standard say $20k for solving severe stomach ulcers with bonuses for things like not having any longterm damage, minimal patient suffering and such. It doesn't matter if they use cheap antibiotics or surgery or how many screening tests were performed in that hypothetical.
Granted there would be major devils in the details especially if it causes "underwater" patients.
You are way off base. The original WSJ article has links to other articles detailing how hospitals merge themselves into a monopoly that has to be accepted by the insurer. The hospital sets the prices. They also go into how these large hospital systems gobble up doctors offices and use the same leverage to increase prices and tack exhoribiant fees--just like the experience of the person you are replying to.
The CSS grid was much-needed in Webflow, but I found the implementation to be pretty unintuitive.
There's a few examples I've run across. One is copy + pasting text, links, or images into the grid - maybe it's just the way I'm using it, but it doesn't let me paste an object into the exact grid box I want intuitively.
Thanks for the feedback! The interesting thing about the CSS grid is that the cells are not actual empty elements, but we want to represent the cells visually somehow to help with affordance. We'll be adding some much needed enhancements to the copy-paste interaction (I mean, it's so fundamental) soon, like giving you the ability to select these non-existent cells so that you can paste inside of them. Let us know if there's anything else that can be improved.
The next big release will include grids with contents that auto-flow vs having to always manually position them.
That's awesome. Improving the copy + paste interactions would definitely make it a lot easier to use.
I actually just started using Webflow a few weeks ago, so I didn't even know that CSS grid was a relatively new feature.
Overall, I really like Webflow so far as it's made the design process so much more iterative for me. I actually export the code (code export was a game-changer) into my own Django project, which gives me more configurability. Kudos to you guys for making a great product!
There's a few reasons why: many businesses are in geographic locations where there's not as much software presence, they don't know how to hire correctly, and they don't want to swallow the bitter pill of "software developers cost significantly more than minimum-wage employees".
I've worked with a company where developers were hired to "glue these two off-the-shelf systems we bought a year ago together", but the implementation was laughably poor. From talking to this specific company's executives, I found that they were confused as to why things were always behind or why they were running into so many bugs. They told me that they were having difficulty accessing software engineers and that there was a market shortage.
What they didn't tell me was that their current "software developers" were ex-military operations folks with no actual dev experience, and that they posted on Indeed/LinkedIn but wanted local talent (in NC, not the Bay Area) and only offered $50k/yr salary with no real benefits.
Wanting only local talent (instead of remote) already reduced their available developer pool by 99%, and the terrible salary put the nail in the coffin. But to company executives, all of this only proved that they lacked access to software developers.
At current prices it’s entirely possible that some software businesses are not viable. Saying that out loud (or even admitting it to yourself) is not a great look.
Further, the software industry is such that failures are more common to successes when it comes to software projects. I suspect if that ratio got better or predictability did, we’d see wages rise even more (at least for those predictably successful devs). As it stands you can throw all of the money at the software hiring problem and still be making a terrible gamble on whether you’ll get software out of it.
The first point is possible, but given an era of super low taxes and massive stock buybacks, I doubt that many of these places can't afford developers, I bet they just would prefer to use that money elsewhere.
I think your latter point is much closer to the mark.
Funny thing is I am trying to get some people from market where they don't make a lot of money and trying to pay 1.5 to 2x what they can get. Still getting people to work is a hassle. I also have no need for ninja/rockstars. It might be that they have comfy jobs already and are afraid of change... Free market is not just about money it still is complicated mixture. So just calling executives greedy is not catch all truth. Maybe I should try to pay 3x more, but business is not there for 3x average salaries for that area.
Maybe it's possible that the fair market rate is actually 3X the local average salary? If that's true then my original point stands, that there are devs, you just can't/won't afford them.
Of course, there could be other factors at play, as you mentioned. Life is complicated, economics more so.
The same can be said of private individuals and housing. But that doesn't mean the level of willingness to pay is trivial or unjustified, and it doesn't mean people who think house prices are too high are greedy.
For example, things like getting companies to agree to a unified standard at a government/industry level & determining frameworks for liability all seem to be as important (and perhaps difficult) as eking out another 0.00001% increase in safety.