Working at Health Catalyst is a distinctly mixed bag. - Software Engineer Health Catalyst Employee Review

The downside, however, is that in R&D, where I am, the work is not exciting at all. The technology platform is quite regressive, and while R&D middle-management talks up a storm about how we need to develop "for the cloud" and use "platform as a service", the reality on the ground is that it's impossible to do that, because some clients are self-hosted and that will continue to be true for the foreseeable future. The technology teams are tasked with maintaining several old versions, because clients are not required to update to newer software. This makes every change and bugfix extremely tedious, as the changes must be backported to multiple versions. Technology decisions are all made by R&D middle management, who suffers from an extreme case of "not invented here syndrome". Everything must utilize the flagship analytics platform, which means that everything must be built from scratch around that platform, even when well-established fully-capable tools already exist. This means time is spent reinventing wheels (poorly) instead of delivering real value for customers. While "dogfooding" is to be commended generally, in many cases, it's unhelpful to pretend that the flagship product is a master of every niche. Even if, on the off-chance that something interesting and forward-thinking does need to be done, it will be done by the "technology inner circle" and handed to the relevant team to maintain, who will never feel any pride in or ownership over it.