Cerner Reviews in Kansas City, MO Area

Pros

Growing company that is well respected in the area.

Cons

Long hours and worked can become routine.

Advice to Senior Management

Create a more relaxed and fun work enviornment will keep more people within the company.

Pros

Good company to work for if you are from the Kansas city area.
Job security.
There are some teams that are doing challenging and interesting initiatives, so it would be good to work for them and use cutting edge technologies.
Stock prices are good and good employee stock options.
Lot of college graduates and young techie folks get hired, so the crowd is young and dynamic.
The engineering campus has a laidback and relaxed atmosphere and no dress code to be followed.

Cons

Too much process work and structured guidelines in the company lead to less freedom and takes the focus away from innovation to all the process work.
Bad work-life balance and the minimum requirement for working hours is 48hrs/week. You get in trouble by HR if you log less than 48 hrs per week.
No reasonable appreciation or compensation for working extremely hard and long hours in delivering results.
A lot of teams use old and unsophisticated technologies (VC++ 6.0 & Visual Basic 6.0) which provides less growth and marketability of your skills and experience.
Terrible practices of managing releases. Engineers are forced to test their code in 5 different code bases.

Advice to Senior Management

Show more appreciation for hard work and dedication and value their employee's personal lives too.
Focus more on quality of software rather than pushing things through to make an impression on upper management.

Pros

Cerner is a great place to develop your technical skills in the softward industry. Healthcare specifically needs more resources that have a technology skill set to handle the demand that the industry is requiring for this transformational period.

Cons

Cerner has a reputation of not having the best client satisfaction ratings. This comes from the business practices in recruiting. Cerner recruits and shuffles their resources without sometimes developing the talent in a way that will benefit the company long term.

Advice to Senior Management

If a company has the talent, I would say that it would be vital to keep the talent competitive within the market from all areas of the work life balance spectrum.

Pros

- "Associates" are very important
- working for something great
- company is growing each year
- International presence
- small close knit teams
- not required to work more than 40 hours, most people want to

Cons

- long hours
- many project in an impossible amount of time
- growing in the company is a very long process

Advice to Senior Management

Look at the employee evaluations. If an engineer is doing well and showing that he or she is a great leader, then that engineer should be promoted as soon as possible. Keep the friendly company culture, Cerner is known all through out Kansas City.

Pros

The high turnover rate (approx 20% in the development organization annually) means there is almost always room/opportunity for advancement. There has been a (very) recent announcement that almost all Millennium (their flagship product) development will be transferred to India by 2012 though, so this might not be the case anymore.

Cerner does a lot of different things - from application that manage ER waiting rooms to applications that run inside various bedside devices. They work with a diverse set of technologies and always have a lot of interesting projects going at once - there is a lot of room for both lateral and upwards movement. At a minimum, Cerner can be a real booster on your resume - they have a good reputation, and anyone who can put in 3+ years will have an easy time finding another job (particularly within the Kansas City area, where Cerner's reputation is widely known)

Cons

Despite many claims to the contrary, there is no such thing as a work/life balance at Cerner. Upper management fosters a mentality of 'get it out the door regardless of the consequences', that can easily foster a constant fire-fighting environment. This varies from team to team (there is a lot of variance in lower management - some are much better about protecting their subordinates from insane upper management requests/deadlines than others).

The vast majority of Cerner developers are woefully un-skilled - compounding the extremely high turnover rate, Cerner tends to hire tons of fresh college graduates and throw them into the deep end. With a severe shortage of domain experts, problem applications generally deteriorate over time as inexperienced developers pile band aids on top of other short-term fixes.

Cerner's training is generally very poor (although this may be changing). Non-technical training is outright abismal. Some of the more technical training was improving before I left, but it was all generally 'industry best practice' type stuff (how to use maven/svn/hudson/etc). They have a real shortage of quality instruction on the things that really matter (how different systems fit together & communicate, standard API usage, etc).

The lack of quality compounded by the lack of knowledge & domain expertise combined with the 'get it shipped' idealology from upper management fosters an environment where everything is critical and little can be accomplished. Typically, problems stemming from this situation are blamed directly on developers (right before I left the company they established a policy where every bug found in production had to be traced back to a single developer who would, in turn, be required to personally explain him/herself to the VP of development).

The benefits are terrible, and salaries are generally lower than the industry standard (albeit generally average for the Kansas City area). Their self-run health insurance program is terrible - it's confusing, expensive, and very poorly run.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop focusing on hiring only college grads. Yes, they're cheap and readily available, but they're not going to be up to the task of maintaining/developing enterprise class healthcare software without senior level guidance from somewhere. Years of high turnover have created two groups of senior level developers/architects - skilled developers who know a wide swath of Cerner technology, and those who are so bad they can't get hired somewhere else.

Don't blame development teams for being unable to meet deadlines imposed arbitrarily by salespeople. Yes it's great if someone makes a 70 million dollar sale, but if it ultimately costs you 77 million to put together the code promised, and pay fines for bugs/delays in the interim, it's not going to pay off. The dev org needs to be heavily involved in all integration talks.

Fix the Healthe exchange (their health insurance). It's poorly run, overly confusing, and very expensive.

Pros

Maybe other teams still are, but not all teams are IT sweatshops. I like all the people I work with, and every manager I've had has been cool.

Cons

Having said that it's not a sweatshop - I'm not really sure if you can get ahead very quick without putting a lot of hours in. Opportunities for advancement seem to be lacking at the moment.

Advice to Senior Management

I feel like my manager basically does the same work a me, so I don't get what the use in "moving up" is. It's just a little weird.

Pros

Leading edge. Learning. Travel. Mission.

Cons

Flying coach. Poor communication. Public company.

Advice to Senior Management

Look outside for resources.

Pros

Traveling, flexible friday hours, young company, growing industry, and a backstage pass to see a side of healthcare that would otherwise require significant amount of education.

A challenging environment that allows you to be creative in exercising technical skills, grow professionally in consulting roles, and network with other young profressionals.

Despite having a demanding workload, I find enough time to enjoy personal hobbies as well as work on side projects to help innovate process. Cerner often has collaboration events that are geared toward socializing and relaxing while at theoffice.

Cons

Cerner's review process should provide more objective criteria and classifications. A majority of associates end up in the same category and will never get an accurrate reflection of their work effort.

For better or worse, I've had close to 8 managers in just over 4 years due to organizational restructures. This has made it challenging for managers to get to know their reports from both a personal and professional level.

Advice to Senior Management

Increase objectivity in reviewal process and apply ability to acheive bonuses.
Create more consistency in the organizational structure rather then year after year changes.

Pros

Believing in the mission to transform healthcare.
I have been able to do interesting and challenging work
Opportunity to learn new technologies

Cons

At times long hours are required, sometimes as much as 60 hours a week although usually 48-50 is the norm.

Advice to Senior Management

Give honest information to associates about the direction the company is taking and what it means as far as positions in Kansas City.

Pros

good starting pay for college graduate and stable company

Cons

More fit for single life due to travel. the bright side is that yoiu got to discover many new cities

Advice to Senior Management

promotion by merit