I’ll go first. I did lots of policy writing, and SOP writing with a medical insurance company. I was often forced to do phone customer service as an “additional duties as needed” work task.
On this particular day, I was doing phone support for medicaid customers, during the covid pandemic. I talked to one gentleman that had an approval to get injections in his joints for pain. (Anti-inflamatory, steroid type injections.) His authorization was approved right when covid started, and all doctor’s offices shut the fuck down for non emergent care. When he was able to reschedule his injections, the authorization had expired. His doctor sent in a new authorization request.
This should have been a cut and dry approval. During the pandemic 50% of the staff was laid off because we were acquired by a larger health insurance conglomerate, and the number of authorization and claim denials soared. I’m 100% convinced that most of those denials were being made because the staff that was there were overburdened to the point of just blanket denying shit to make their KPIs. The denial reason was, “Not medically necessary,” which means, not enough clinical information was provided to prove it was necessary. I saw the original authorization, and the clinical information that went with it, and I saw the new authorization, which had the same charts and history attached.
I spent 4 hours on the phone with this man putting an appeal together. I put together EVERY piece of clinical information from both authorizations, along with EVERY claim we paid related to this particular condition, along with every pharmacy claim we approved for pain medication related to this man’s condition, to demonstrate that there was enough evidence to prove medical necessity.
I gift wrapped this shit for the appeals team to make the review process as easy as possible. They kicked the appeal back to me, denying it after 15 minutes. There is no way it was reviewed in 15 minutes. I printed out the appeal + all the clinical information and mailed it to that customer with my personal contact information. Then I typed up my resignation letter, left my ID badge, and bounced.
24 hours later, I helped that customer submit an appeal to our state agency that does external appeals, along with a complaint to the attorney general. The state ended up overturning the denial, and the insurance company was forced to pay for his pain treatments.
It took me 9 months to find another 9-5 job, but it was worth it.
More funny than rage inducing.
Worked as a Senior DevOps engineer at a startup. They have no proper automation for deploying their code. Manually updating config in a GUI type situation. This takes a crazy amount of time, there are many errors, and it generally slows down development progress. There are 300 people working there, at least five dev teams, its hundreds of work hours every month wasted by this.
So I start writing a system to automate it - what is called Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery or CI/CD. Issue is, they have many projects, they are all a little different and managed by different people. No problem, I write the thing super configurable and write another system that will automatically deploy this thing to all the hundreds of repositories, taking into account their local config. We start rolling it out, when I suddenly get a new boss.
They are very smart but the kind of person that wants to do everything their way. So they did all the architecture and just delegated the most menial implementation details. At my previous company I pretty much rebuild every system from scratch. Yet now I was super bored and underutilized, while they were pretty overworked and stressed out. All while the company was held together with duct tape.
While this boss was really good in certain areas, I was more experienced in others, and they kept making errors that could have been easily avoided if they just asked me earlier. And they did not like when that was pointed out. Thing is, I was hired as a senior engineer. It is my entire job to be more experienced and point issues out, especially security related.
So this new boss is being super careful about this CI/CD system that I wrote. They are scared that deploying my system may break things - understandable. So the entire project grinds to a halt. I keep pushing for it but give up after a while.
Then, one day, my boss says “alright, today we deploy the CI/CD solution to ALL repos. By hand.”. I’m a bit puzzled by this: has the reason for being careful suddenly disappeared? Why not use my automated system to deploy it? Doing it by hand is super repetitive and annoying. Also, if there is a bug in our solution, we would need to roll out the fix manually as well. That’s why I wrote automation for that.
So I ask to clarify: " so you’re sure we should deploy this to all repos now? You always wanted us to be careful about that". Answer: “are you incapable of reading?! New information > old information!”. I laugh, think about it for 15 min and put in my resignation, suggesting they hire a Junior instead. Bit of a shame, the place was pretty cool. Just the boss was a dolt. Also they quit a month later.