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> This isn't medical school where you need 8 years of education and experience before you can begin to practice your profession with a limited chance of killing

> This isn't medical school where you need 8 years of education and experience before you can begin to practice your profession with a limited chance of killing someone. Completely disagree with this statement. Being a doctor and being a programmer are similar in a lot of ways. In both fields unless you are a specialized expert focusing on the cutting edge of research you really don't need 8 years study/doctoral training. Most doctor jobs are like most programming jobs, the same old simple tasks day in and day out, diagnosing the flue for the 100 trillionth time, or writing a controller/view for the billionth time. As a society, we've allowed a lot of bureaucracy to build up around the medical profession, which is one of the (many) reasons medical costs are rising and innovation is less that in would be otherwise. Imagine how slow we would be to innovate and make technological progress, if we forced everyone who wanted to write software to undergo 4 years of bachelor schooling and 8 years on top of that of rigorous study and training before they could begin to write a crud app. There's obviously a spectrum of expertise that's needed, and its a shame our medical systems don't allow for it. A sysadmin does not need a phd in theoretical computer science to keep his companies server's running at high uptime rates, and a family doctor does not need 12 years of study to diagnose common illnesses and refer people to experts, and a dentist should honestly be a regular trade job learned in an apprenticeship.

crdoconnor 9y ago
>Most doctor jobs are like most programming jobs, the same old simple tasks day in and day out, diagnosing the flue for the 100 trillionth time, or writing a controller/view for the billionth time. I tend to find that programmers who have repetitive jobs are simply programmers who don't automate their workflow, don't make full use of vast the ecosystem of packages at their fingertips and don't build useful abstractions. That's as true for CRUD apps as it is for anything else. If your job isn't creative & if your job is repetitive you are doing it wrong.
- jfaucett 9y ago
  > if your job is repetitive you are doing it wrong. If jobs weren't repetitive we wouldn't group together a specific set of tasks under a label and hire people who can accomplish said tasks. We also wouldn't even be able to learn a job in the first place because by definition it would constantly be something new and we could never obtain any competency. All learning is acquired through lots of repetitions across variances in experiences in a specific set of tasks. Machines learn this way, and all evidence suggests we do as well.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    >If jobs weren't repetitive we wouldn't group together a specific set of tasks under a label and hire people who can accomplish said tasks. I don't see why not. Since excessive repetitiveness of a task required in order to hire people? Exercising creativity and good judgment rarely happens the same way twice, but it still ought to improve over time. >We also wouldn't even be able to learn a job in the first place because by definition it would constantly be something new and we could never obtain any competency. A) Learning effectively is not the same thing as doing effectively and B) I'm not arguing that every programming job should be entirely devoid of repetition, just that by its nature it shouldn't be repetitive.
    - jfaucett 9y ago
      > Learning effectively is not the same thing as doing effectively. You have to learn in order to do and doing is the means for learning. Its iterative and both reinforce one another. So from my viewpoint, which admittedly is largely from an ML perspective, they are the same thing. Playing basketball effectively is a function of training which is just another word for learning in my mind. > I'm not arguing that every programming job should be entirely devoid of repetition, just that by its nature it shouldn't be repetitive. I think we're just using different meanings for "repetitive" and perhaps some other words and that's leading to apparent disagreement which in actuality I doubt we have. I was speaking generally i.e. not about automating your build/deployment/bootstrapping pipelines or building/using a library to solve problem X, but about the process as a whole and the more general tasks that go into that process. In that sense of repetitive, i.e. a set of tasks like "building the login", "integrate 3rd party API", "deliver mail", "build a chair" etc. I think virtually all jobs are very repetitive. In the sense of repetitiveness I think you are talking about, i.e. programming the exact same function every single time you need that functionality in a new app, I would agree with you. Anyway, my point was jobs are about performing a specific set of repeating tasks - generally speaking :). Further, we've poorly designed the labor supply side of our medical systems given the set of tasks doctors are required to perform and we could allocate supply/demand better and innovate at a higher rate were we to remove some of those systems engineering errors.
pjmlp 9y ago
Well, here in Europe better have some university degree, to get through HR. Yes, quite a few people don't, but chances of getting a job quicly diminishes. Having studied in a technical school before appplying to university, I really saw a difference between both skill levels in what I was capable of achieving. Even CRUD applications might need some CS knowledge to properly implement business rules that don't take days to finish execution.

crdoconnor 9y ago

>Most doctor jobs are like most programming jobs, the same old simple tasks day in and day out, diagnosing the flue for the 100 trillionth time, or writing a controller/view for the billionth time. I tend to find that programmers who have repetitive jobs are simply programmers who don't automate their workflow, don't make full use of vast the ecosystem of packages at their fingertips and don't build useful abstractions. That's as true for CRUD apps as it is for anything else. If your job isn't creative & if your job is repetitive you are doing it wrong.

jfaucett 9y ago
> if your job is repetitive you are doing it wrong. If jobs weren't repetitive we wouldn't group together a specific set of tasks under a label and hire people who can accomplish said tasks. We also wouldn't even be able to learn a job in the first place because by definition it would constantly be something new and we could never obtain any competency. All learning is acquired through lots of repetitions across variances in experiences in a specific set of tasks. Machines learn this way, and all evidence suggests we do as well.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >If jobs weren't repetitive we wouldn't group together a specific set of tasks under a label and hire people who can accomplish said tasks. I don't see why not. Since excessive repetitiveness of a task required in order to hire people? Exercising creativity and good judgment rarely happens the same way twice, but it still ought to improve over time. >We also wouldn't even be able to learn a job in the first place because by definition it would constantly be something new and we could never obtain any competency. A) Learning effectively is not the same thing as doing effectively and B) I'm not arguing that every programming job should be entirely devoid of repetition, just that by its nature it shouldn't be repetitive.
  - jfaucett 9y ago
    > Learning effectively is not the same thing as doing effectively. You have to learn in order to do and doing is the means for learning. Its iterative and both reinforce one another. So from my viewpoint, which admittedly is largely from an ML perspective, they are the same thing. Playing basketball effectively is a function of training which is just another word for learning in my mind. > I'm not arguing that every programming job should be entirely devoid of repetition, just that by its nature it shouldn't be repetitive. I think we're just using different meanings for "repetitive" and perhaps some other words and that's leading to apparent disagreement which in actuality I doubt we have. I was speaking generally i.e. not about automating your build/deployment/bootstrapping pipelines or building/using a library to solve problem X, but about the process as a whole and the more general tasks that go into that process. In that sense of repetitive, i.e. a set of tasks like "building the login", "integrate 3rd party API", "deliver mail", "build a chair" etc. I think virtually all jobs are very repetitive. In the sense of repetitiveness I think you are talking about, i.e. programming the exact same function every single time you need that functionality in a new app, I would agree with you. Anyway, my point was jobs are about performing a specific set of repeating tasks - generally speaking :). Further, we've poorly designed the labor supply side of our medical systems given the set of tasks doctors are required to perform and we could allocate supply/demand better and innovate at a higher rate were we to remove some of those systems engineering errors.

pjmlp 9y ago

Well, here in Europe better have some university degree, to get through HR. Yes, quite a few people don't, but chances of getting a job quicly diminishes. Having studied in a technical school before appplying to university, I really saw a difference between both skill levels in what I was capable of achieving. Even CRUD applications might need some CS knowledge to properly implement business rules that don't take days to finish execution.