If doctors were interviewed like software developers • Hacker News Board

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#81

Post by rcoveson » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #70

hpen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you love if software required a degree? Would it make you feel more special? I recently got a job as a software engineer without a degree. And I can get plenty of interviews.

It would make it much easier to find a job and the salaries would be a higher (assuming one has a degree). Developers really don't realize how bad they have it. If you have friends who passed to be doctors, nurses, lawyers, they can all have a much easier and longer career. You will see what are your prospects after 15 years of development, if you were not driven out of the industry, it's grim.

I'd take my financial experience as a college dropout software engineer over that of a doctor or lawyer any day. I get to spend my 20's debt free and mega rich (by young adult standards), and I've been able to save most of my considerable income. I think the average doctor's net worth might surpass mine in their late 30's, and would certainly accelerate beyond what I could ever keep up with. But so what? I get to spend an entire life never stressing about money once, while they have to stress over student debt for 15-20 years.

My "prospects after 10 years of development" are going to be "figuring out what to do now that my house is paid off and I don't need to make half as much as I do anymore". Compare those to a doctor's prospects after 10 years of college: "Time to start making money for the first time!"

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#82

Post by nemo44x » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

anon73044 wrote: post #67

nemo44x wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these roles have certain code they have to work to. A plumber can't just go into a home and install something outside of code. Software is generally rather ephemeral and without a code to write or build to. We have "best practices". Yes, some software is built under engineering assumptions - airplane software, etc. NASA has a standard they write code to and software engineers are expected to work within these con…

>A plumber can't just go into a home and install something outside of code. That is....not true at all. A plumber/carpenter/electrician works to code under threat of losing their license. Additionally your building could be exempt from code for numerous reasons (grandfathered/historical, outside of city limits and no county building codes/etc.) Developers and Software Engineers don't have this threat.

Right, if they continue to do things short of code (when required, etc) they'd lose their license. They have to work within the confines of the code, where applicable.

Software engineers will certainly lose their job if they don't ship code to standards set by the company they work for. Someone writing code for an airplane is going to have a different type of standard than someone writing code for video game, however.

Why would it make sense for a government agency to set a code for software? It literally makes no sense as different problems have different requirements.

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#83

Post by thesehands » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

sa46 wrote: post #39

ogre_codes wrote: post #3

"We have a lot of redheaded patients, we're looking for someone who has at least 7 years experience working with redheaded patients on a regular basis"

I can't speak to doctors, but I know a few nurse practitioners and jobs will auto-reject if you don't have the correct specialty. A quick search reveals there's at least 13 specialties [1]. "We need an adult gerontology nurse practitioner, not orthopedics." I thought this was interesting because a common programmer hiring model assumes you can train an exceptional programmer to your specific stack regardless of their…

You can train programmers because there is time and there aren’t often lives at stake. Nurses have to hit the ground running in specialist areas where there is (I’d assume) often little time to acquire all necessary skills in order to perform at the required level

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#84

Post by bigwavedave » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #73

bigwavedave wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP doesn't say it's never happened, just that the typical programmer isn't going to kill someone with a buggy password complexity validator. By and large, the standard programmer does not hold life and death in their hands when navigating callback hell.

Tell that to citizens who can't register for unemployment or fill their taxes because the callback hell doesn't work as it should.

Again, the typical programmer doesn't kill someone when they write a bug. Judging from the backlogs of each company I've worked at, not a single PaaS, SaaS, BaaS, CaaS, DaaS, FaaS, GaaS, HaaS, JaaS, KaaS, LaaS, MaaS, NaaS, QaaS, RaaS, TaaS, VaaS, WaaS, XaaS, YaaS, ZaaS, or other would have a living customer base if one bug == one death.

There are edge cases and there are certainly plenty of times when software bugs can kill people. However, to say that the typical programmer holds life and death in their hands with every keystroke is an extreme over-exaggeration and I think you know that.

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#85

Post by scruple » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #74

Dumblydorr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of the incredibly successful people we know of in the industry were drop outs? I can think of quite a few, and I know of other engineers who thought their CS program was vastly inferior to devoting 100% attention to their company, which they could give maybe 33% to due to classes and undergrad life.

> " How many of the incredibly successful people we know of in the industry were drop outs Knuth, Dijkstra, Kernighan, Ritchie, etc. all had degrees, although some are non-CS because CS degrees weren't a thing back then. Linus Torvalds, Dave Cutler, and Theo de Raadt all have degrees. The only hardcore coder (i.e. not a business person) without a degree I can think of is John Carmack.

jwz and Carmack are the canonical examples but I also can't think of anyone else who is as widely known as those two.

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#86

Post by brlewis » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

henryfjordan wrote: post #23

b20000 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will leave this right here for your education - https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster

To GP's point, nobody died in that disaster. A much better example would have been the Therac-25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

These two examples are interesting. They're both cases where what was being created was a system where software was an important component, as opposed to the software written by the vast majority of us where the hardware components of the system are always the same (monitor, keyboard, etc.) This is the same distinction in Diamond v Diehr for when software might be included in a patent. I always thought the US Supreme Court made a good decision there. Unfortunately they were later overruled by lower courts. (For legal experts out there about to correct me and say that lower courts can't overrule higher courts, I wish you were right.)

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#87

Post by brlewis » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #49

black_puppydog wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

chances of being miserable in an administrative job^W^Wordinary life because some software product you have to use is making your job worse rather than better are close to 100%. If you only count deaths, yeah, bad programming has negligible impact maybe. If you extend it to general suffering, it's quite a drag on everyone actually. And incidentally, good programming can make a world of a difference, too. So wanting t…

Is bad programming a net negative? I'm not convinced (and it's not just because I'm a bad programmer, I swear!), I think if you only had good programming, you'd have very little programming and that would be concentrated of the areas that the powers that be deem most important: military, finance, police, factories. Having bad programming gets you a lot of programming. I'd rather have a million people who can each bui…

> Having bad programming gets you a lot of programming

This is true. I'll add that machine learning is arguably the computer doing a lot of bad programming.

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#88

Post by TwistedWeasel » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #60

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web apps are a small fraction of the software development world. Software Engineers are responsible for code that runs in hospitals, aircraft, power switching stations, and many many other safety critical systems. In many cases code that was never written for safety critical work is deployed in those environments. What OS and software runs the elevator controls in a hospital or military base? We never know the real i…

That's really not true. At NASA for example there are standards that need to be followed when designing a system, implementing the code for it, reviewing and testing it, and releasing it. [1] Yes there will always be bugs but no practice or method is invulnerable to this. Software in general, in these high risk environments, has been extraordinarily successful in terms of reliability and safety. [1] https://sma.nasa.…

At NASA, sure. You can't say that with any certainty for all the other systems in the world where software has a huge impact on daily life and human wellbeing. We can't know for sure because there is no regulation or independent monitoring.

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#89

Post by TwistedWeasel » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #82

anon73044 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A plumber can't just go into a home and install something outside of code. That is....not true at all. A plumber/carpenter/electrician works to code under threat of losing their license. Additionally your building could be exempt from code for numerous reasons (grandfathered/historical, outside of city limits and no county building codes/etc.) Developers and Software Engineers don't have this threat.

Right, if they continue to do things short of code (when required, etc) they'd lose their license. They have to work within the confines of the code, where applicable. Software engineers will certainly lose their job if they don't ship code to standards set by the company they work for. Someone writing code for an airplane is going to have a different type of standard than someone writing code for video game, however…

Left up to private enterprise they will set their standards to the lowest they can get away with to maximize profits and reduce the time to market.

Re: If doctors were interviewed like software developers

#90

Post by TwistedWeasel » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #65

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define mature? Is it about stability? There are newer and more modern methods of construction and engineering and the field is always evolving. Maturity in those fields is about consistency and agreements of best practices enforced by standards and regulations. Software is not mature because it's not regulated. If you want software engineering to mature and stabilize, it needs more regulation.

Yes, construction etc is evolving, but it's doing that as such a slow pace compared to software engineering.

Are you sure? Construction materials are evolving and changing every few years (engineered lumber, modern environmentally friendly methods, etc) whilst we still use base operating systems designed in the 60's for most of our services.