Mayo Clinic reviews

First of all, getting into Mayo Clinic for a full time position is extremely difficult if you don't have the right connections and lots of patience. The recruitment process there is horrible, as they may put you on hold indefinitely without giving you a word of what's going on. And, in order to get in, you must put on a fake show in such a way as to conform to their standards of personality and behavior. In my experience, not much work was ever really done there, but it was mostly meetings and other things that got in the way of real work.

Mayo, from an IT/IS perspective has some big problems and frustrations. First, our failure rate on projects is much higher than it should be. There are many reasons for this. One is the strict requirements from a development point of view. Mayo has an IT standard called the Target Technical Architecture (TTA). The goal of the TTA is to provide a uniform, consistent IT infrastructure across this organization, a nobel goal. But what it really does is lock us into a set of tools that is out of date, and not optimal for the problems we are trying to solve. This makes work tedious and boring and redundant. When you know there are better solutions, but you are not allowed to use them, it can be very demoralizing. I think it also stifles creativity. Another problem is that Mayo's IT infrastructure lacks a good project management and testing group for IT projects. One of the most frustrating and demoralizing decisions recently is that all IT staff at Mayo are going to be required to wear business formal. For many of us with no direct patient contact, this makes no sense. It is going to make work more uncomfortable for many of us. Its also expensive for us to have to go out and buy a fancy wardrobe.