Well yeah, it might not be as exciting as webapps, but that's the difference between a job and a hobby. If your daily job includes exactly the kind of craftsmanship you could spend years doing happily, that's great; but if your job is more boring than that, you still have a few hours each day to devote to the more exciting kind of software development. However, in the meantime, your job, as boring as it might be on the worst days, is still saving lives and working for the good of the society. Hell, I wish I could say the same about my job (which may affect millions of people around the world, but in a far less relevant way).
Yes, you do matter. People are better off thanks to you. Sincerely: congratulations, you're a lucky man.
Re:Just had a heart attack
by lotsofmangos on Monday November 03, 2014 @12:06PM
(#8551910)
It is far more exciting than webapps.
Webapps are the technical equivalent of Richie Cunningham but biomedical engineering is The Fonz.
Probably a selfish, personal comment, but I immediately searched for the word "troponin" in this thread and smiled to see it in the second post.
As an engineer having spent the last decade or so on an instrument that, among other analytes, measures the level of troponin in your blood (serum), it's quite satisfying to remember that my work is saving lives. Sure, you may not have been analyzed by one of our instruments, but somewhere a group of software, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineers out there suffered through the miasma of FDA-required procedures, onerous development process, reviewing every line of code, arguments about exactly what a STAT reponse means, ridiculous training requirements, long validation procedures run by the most anal testers ever and ended up with an instrument that helped save your life.
It might not be as exciting as state of the art webapps, but it's nice to be reminded that we matter.