Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

I don't know about that. Software scales almost infinitely. Impossible to double the number of billable hours or patient load of a cardiologist outside of an herculean effort, but software folks can easily 10x the number of people they bring value to in a short amount of time.

> We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are making great money by utilizing the greatest tool of all time: the computer.

Honestly, medical school isn't really the correct example to use because it's not efficient at all.

The big reason medical schooling is so hard is because they have to get a completely unrelated undergrad before even thinking about applying to med school. That means racking up serious debts before even knowing if you are going to get admitted. You can imagine how that fosters a culture of diversity and inclusion and help poor, often non-white, applicants reach medicine when the first step is to get into 6 figures debts with absolutely no guaranteed income.

Other countries with similar health outcomes for their population simply admit freshmen into med school right away.

Residency is something else. It's overworked since the total number of residents is capped by the AMA (also you have to fly-in to your residency interviews on your dime, so much for underrepresented applicants!) and honestly there's a lot of cargo culting. 48 hours shifts with no sleep because it's believed that it's impossible to correctly handover patients from one medical professional to the other (hint, this is a solved problem in a lot of high stress cognitive disciplines outside of healthcare). It's a culture of always working harder instead of working smarter, and the people take pride in that strangely enough.

All it really does is create a moat and allow AMA members to charge more because they made themselves scarce.

> Meanwhile, our friends who are teachers, firefighters, child-care workers, etc. are doing tough work daily for less pay, perhaps simply because they didn't use computers much or didn't like them. And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid.

Firefighters tend to have nice pension funds in a lot of cities.

Teacher's pay is incredibly interesting. Engineers are paid on results (this is even more true at serious tech companies where a significant portion of ones earning will be stock comp) while teachers are paid a government approved rate no matter the results.

I know a lot of parents that would pay serious money to teachers based on results (if their kid can get into Stanford/MIT for instance) if said teachers could show a track record of having previously mentored alumni for instance. Instead, the premium is now captured by real-estate since parents that care will pay extra to get into a good school district.

This is a ridiculous statement and just really devalues everything you are saying. How is a vulnerability in a library that is completely orthogonal to typing relevant in this discussion. Static typing never claimed to cure programmer stupidity.

Also when I say static typing I mean languages with good type systems, as much as people like to say typescript is bad because it's based on javascript, at least null errors are impossible if you are using strict mode unlike Java and Go where any variable could potentially be null and the compiler wont tell you if you have unhandled null cases.

Additionally for things like static typing, the larger the company the more risk-averse people tend to be within the company so things that give a feeling of safety like type-safety are going to be a much easier sell.