For what it's worth, here's my limited perspective. I worked at Cerner for two years in marketing, a department not highly valued. As a 10-year professional, I came to Cerner fully aware of its reputation, but I needed to leave publishing, and a new title/skillset would help open my options. So, off I went. I did my time, took some new steps, and kicked the company to the curb before it could do the same to me. Now I have a great new job at a place that actually values its employees. Go figure. There are a number of Cerner refugees there, and we constantly joke about how we need some sort of therapy to cope with a corporate environment in which we have time to think and plan, to collaborate meaningfully without some random panic item derailing our week, and to go home to our families at a reasonable hour, our dignity intact.
In my time at Cerner, here's what I learned:
1. There are people who care. This is perhaps the greatest tragedy. Good, hard-working (often clinical) people who believe(d) in Cerner's vision are now stuck selling/developing solutions that rank near the bottom among their competitors.
2. The 80% of new hires straight from college metric is true. And Cerner's clients don't really appreciate that.
3. Neal's brilliant. Hard to argue with that. And he's also a raging egomaniac with the people skills of a drunken fascist. I loved how he was afraid of having the smaller audience for his keynote at the Cerner Health Conference, so he moved Senator Kerry to a different day. I also loved how he used the company resources to cater to his personal projects.
4. The company STRONGLY encourages that employees change roles frequently, presumably to keep them from accumulating enough expertise in a given role to justify a significant pay increase. I changed roles once, and my workload doubled without any pay increase. In fact, for that hourly rate (I regularly put in 60- to 70-hour weeks, which is still not as much as what other people endure), I could've managed a convenience store. As an assistant. And been happier.
5. In my department, the poverty of leadership at the executive level was astounding. It was bad enough that the rest of the company crapped on us. Worse that our own execs did likewise.
6. Planning is meaningless. You can plan all you want, but when the next shiny object appears, it goes right out the window. All wasted work.
I had my final moment of epiphany when, after a 70-hour week traveling and working, I spent my weekend working on my 2008 plan (snapping at my daughter in the process). I come to work Monday only to find a new template waiting, and more work to redo on said plan. Then we get more template instructions at 5 pm, with a demand to submit by 8 am the next day. That was it for me. My wife and child deserve better than to have me come home angry and bitter every night. I deserve better. We all do.
There are a lot of people at that company about whom I care. Good, hard-working people. To them, I say this: Get out. Life can and will be better. Reclaim your soul.
I had a friend once tell me after a layoff (at a different company) that it's like those bad nuclear war movies of the 80s. Who has it worse, the people who are killed in the initial blast or the poor souls who are left behind to die a slow, miserable death? I'd feel sorry for those whom Cerner let go, but in reality, they'll be better off for it.
