If you go into computer science, you will: * Work with a lot of socially underdeveloped people. Hey, they spend their time fighting compilers, not reaching consensus. Soft skills are largely irrelevant. * Probably work in one of a very few technology hubs around the world. This is all the more painful when you realize how little interaction you actually need with your team, and you could be doing your job from a shac…
Social interactions are trivial compared to computer science. Truly smart people have no difficulty talking to others, because their knowledge propelled them to understand how little sense it makes to be impolite in face of all that is to know. I would wager that it's others who have difficulty talking to us programmers in a clear, calm and efficient way, not the other way around. If you care about how others perceiv…
My wife is a doctor, still in residency, so I know the kind of training doctors go through. She has taken in an inhuman amount of information during her training. No, she hasn't retained it all, but that's impossible.
Geeks understand that we're working with a very deep stack, and for nearly all of us, there are parts of the stack we don't understand. Say you're making a web app. Complete understanding would include include psychology and user interaction theory, color theory and screen resolutions and graphic design, the inner workings of browsers, markup, CSS and Javascript, the whole networking stack from electrical pulses up to HTTP, public/private key encryption, the many nuances of well-factored code, compilers and interpreters, databases, operating systems, memory managent, and chip logic down to the logical gates and the low-level physics of electricity. What parts can go wrong and how? What security risks exist in this stack?
There is too much for one person to know it all, and that's in a system that people designed, where there are specialists who can fully understand at least part of it. Doctors have an even deeper stack, from chemistry and DNA and cell biology up to organs and systems and disease processes, all the way up to the psychology of patient interactions. Nobody understands the parts of this stack. People spend their whole lives studying things like cellular metabolic processes and immune system biochemical cascades and don't fully understand them. How can a doctor know more than all the specialists combined?
Clearly there are good doctors and bad ones. But it's ludicrous to say that they "retain little to nothing of what they learned" or "their knowledge is useless trivia." It's arrogance.
If someone tells you their monitor doesn't work and they think it's because they have a computer virus, you could hardly begin to tell them how wrongly they understand their computer. You would not appreciate having your objections dismissed by this person who does not know your field at all. Please don't do the same to people who are experts in other highly complex fields.