
Ask HN: What's software engineering like in the health sector? - gravy
Looking to make my first career move, just wondering what it&#x27;s like and what to expect. I&#x27;d like to apply my skills there
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speedgoose
The health sector is large and big. It depends on what you want to do and
where.

If you are manipulating personal information and patients data, and perhaps
storing it, it's very very different whether you are in USA or Germany for
example. The local laws and rules are very different. Germany is very strict
while USA isn't at all.

In my personal experience, security and privacy are very important. The
quality of service is also critical too, though the healthcare providers do
have backups plans when a service is unavailable.

In terms of technologies, it's mostly the same than everywhere else. You can't
really expect to have full stack medically certified software, including the
kernels, the compilers, the vms... So you usually use the software industry
standards and certify your service only.

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triyambakam
As the other poster wrote, in terms of tech it does depend. It is cliche but
true for me. I have worked on a few different teams at my current company.
Previously I wrote an HL7 parser and worked on data integration services, so
it was very domain specific. Now I am writing frontend React, which has almost
no healthcare domain technology in it. I like this flexibility. It's fun to
write parsers and data integrations, but when that gets tiring it's nice to do
something nearly unrelated to healthtech. Edit: We deal with lots of archaic
formats and protocols but most all our code is Golang and Typescript

