6 ms·

I agree with you, but I'd like to add to the "did you treat any diseases in high school". I knew someone in high school who wanted to be a doctor. She didn't cu

I agree with you, but I'd like to add to the "did you treat any diseases in high school". I knew someone in high school who wanted to be a doctor. She didn't cure any diseases or perform surgery, but she did read all that she could and was fascinated by medical-themed tv & movies. She had been inspired by her pediatrician when she was young. She did't treat people before becoming a doctor, but from early on she had the inspiration, passion, and drive. She became a doctor. She did it for the love of the profession, not solely because it was a "good paying job" (though, I'm sure that helped). I think coding in high school is the expression of having passion -- it's the passion that you should really be looking for, however that is expressed for profession X.

snowwrestler 8y ago
Sure, I didn't mean to imply that there aren't people who are passionate from a young age about being doctors--there certainly are! But, I think it's not taken as a necessary attribute within the medical field. There are a lot of great doctors who didn't decide to pursue medicine until college, or maybe even later, and as a whole the field seems fine with that.
- arkades 8y ago
  > There are a lot of great doctors who didn't decide to pursue medicine until college, or maybe even later, and as a whole the field seems fine with that. Med schools are increasingly selecting for that, in fact. Second careerists tend to do better (because they're adults), and have less burnout (because they're more likely to have made a knowledgeable adult decision about what they're getting into, rather than being disappointed reality didn't live up to fantasy.)
  - walshemj 8y ago
    One of the pioneers in the Pc business Ed Roberts (invented the altair 8800) did that. Eventually became a GP (family doctor) in Georgia
freehunter 8y ago
On the other hand, it's hard enough to expect 18 year olds to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives, if we only hire people who showed passion in high school now we're pushing that all the way back to 14 years old. I didn't even know my career existed until after my freshman year of college, but no one I work with would say I'm not passionate about what I do.
- justjash 8y ago
  Yep, I never wrote a line of code until I was 22 and had a couple years of college under my belt.
- luckydata 8y ago
  I don't think the issue is when people show passion for anything but if. I started playing guitar late in life, but it's a consuming passion of mine. I fell in love with programming early, and out of love with it during college. That's why I moved in a lateral field (product management) where the skills I learned are useful but it's not required of me to do something 10 hours per day that I really don't love. I love my current profession, I spend a lot of time privately to study and get better every day, I work on building my toolset of templates and a strong reference library. I think that's the important part, showing dedication to improvement.
arkades 8y ago
Ironically, med schools are taking the opposite tack. Because reading books and watching TV shows about medicine are so wildly divorced from the real thing, and because so many kids are really launched towards medicine by their parents, "I always wanted to be a doctor" is considered a (mild) red flag: it's an indicator that someone is pursuing the field based on childish fantasies rather than a rational, adult decision. The former tends to create more failures and burnouts, which med schools try to avoid if for no other reason than because drop-outs are lost tuition. As a doc: you can't become a doc for love of the profession, because it's a profession you can't test drive. You can become a doc for love of the fantasy of the profession. It's awesome that programming is different in that way: you can't produce an OS in HS, probably, but you can certainly take a run at making simple stuff in python or simple iphone games.
- luckydata 8y ago
  You can absolutely become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation. Many of my friends displayed a caring side very early on (middle school).
  - arkades 8y ago
    > become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation That’s the fantasy. And, hey, when it pops up, awesome - it’s a very energizing moment. However, most medicine has absolutely nothing to do with that day to day. The day to day is subject to Pareto’s Law. A surgeon may occasionally get to “take care of the sick,” but 80% of the time they get to do a five minute chart review of an obvious gallbladder passed along from the ED, a cookie cutter GB removal, and an uneventful recovery that involves a daily stomach poke and the same handful of questions they ask every other post-op pt on the floor. Medicine is a technical profession.
    - kamaal 8y ago
      One likely won't get that good at surgery unless they practiced a lot. And if they had no interest towards that profession they likely won't be putting in crazy hours in their prime early career time becoming a surgeon. You can't even become good at flipping burgers without being interested in doing it.
rademacher 8y ago
Why penalize folks who didn't know what they wanted to do in high school. It took me a long time to get a vague idea of what I wanted to do for a career and it's something I have to constantly contend with. In fact, I'm still trying to pinpoint what exactly I'm looking for. I know things have changed in the last few years, to the point where high school kids are in pre-engineering or pre-cs programs and getting special instruction. As an aside, the advantages of knowing what you want early are huge assuming that you continue down that path for a long while. If we consider something like graduate school, knowing as a freshmen that you want a PhD means growing your network early, cozying up to professors to write recs, doing REUs. You could have someone figure out towards the end of undergrad that they want to continue on and really struggle to put together a compelling package even though they might be just as passionate or have just as much potential. Sorry that was kind of a rant.
HeavyStorm 8y ago
I think that the metaphor is wrong - comparing writing software with other fields such as medicine makes little sense: there's a lot of basic knowledge necessary to perform even the simplest steps as a doctor (or an engineer or a lawyer), meaning a higher barrier to entry. Software development is more easily compared to things such as cooking, playing some instrument or even writing. There's some knowledge and training involved but that can be learned very quickly and a lot of stuff can be done on intuition. There's been a number of geniuses composers who wrote songs at very young ages; there's potential for that in software as well. It doesn't means that more experience doesn't matter - whatever someone developed at an early age is bound to be worse than after more years of practice, but you can start programming very early. However, humans are complex and you can have boy geniuses and late comers that are equivalent.

snowwrestler 8y ago

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that there aren't people who are passionate from a young age about being doctors--there certainly are! But, I think it's not taken as a necessary attribute within the medical field. There are a lot of great doctors who didn't decide to pursue medicine until college, or maybe even later, and as a whole the field seems fine with that.

arkades 8y ago
> There are a lot of great doctors who didn't decide to pursue medicine until college, or maybe even later, and as a whole the field seems fine with that. Med schools are increasingly selecting for that, in fact. Second careerists tend to do better (because they're adults), and have less burnout (because they're more likely to have made a knowledgeable adult decision about what they're getting into, rather than being disappointed reality didn't live up to fantasy.)
- walshemj 8y ago
  One of the pioneers in the Pc business Ed Roberts (invented the altair 8800) did that. Eventually became a GP (family doctor) in Georgia

freehunter 8y ago

On the other hand, it's hard enough to expect 18 year olds to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives, if we only hire people who showed passion in high school now we're pushing that all the way back to 14 years old. I didn't even know my career existed until after my freshman year of college, but no one I work with would say I'm not passionate about what I do.

justjash 8y ago
Yep, I never wrote a line of code until I was 22 and had a couple years of college under my belt.
luckydata 8y ago
I don't think the issue is when people show passion for anything but if. I started playing guitar late in life, but it's a consuming passion of mine. I fell in love with programming early, and out of love with it during college. That's why I moved in a lateral field (product management) where the skills I learned are useful but it's not required of me to do something 10 hours per day that I really don't love. I love my current profession, I spend a lot of time privately to study and get better every day, I work on building my toolset of templates and a strong reference library. I think that's the important part, showing dedication to improvement.

arkades 8y ago

Ironically, med schools are taking the opposite tack. Because reading books and watching TV shows about medicine are so wildly divorced from the real thing, and because so many kids are really launched towards medicine by their parents, "I always wanted to be a doctor" is considered a (mild) red flag: it's an indicator that someone is pursuing the field based on childish fantasies rather than a rational, adult decision. The former tends to create more failures and burnouts, which med schools try to avoid if for no other reason than because drop-outs are lost tuition. As a doc: you can't become a doc for love of the profession, because it's a profession you can't test drive. You can become a doc for love of the fantasy of the profession. It's awesome that programming is different in that way: you can't produce an OS in HS, probably, but you can certainly take a run at making simple stuff in python or simple iphone games.

luckydata 8y ago
You can absolutely become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation. Many of my friends displayed a caring side very early on (middle school).
- arkades 8y ago
  > become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation That’s the fantasy. And, hey, when it pops up, awesome - it’s a very energizing moment. However, most medicine has absolutely nothing to do with that day to day. The day to day is subject to Pareto’s Law. A surgeon may occasionally get to “take care of the sick,” but 80% of the time they get to do a five minute chart review of an obvious gallbladder passed along from the ED, a cookie cutter GB removal, and an uneventful recovery that involves a daily stomach poke and the same handful of questions they ask every other post-op pt on the floor. Medicine is a technical profession.
  - kamaal 8y ago
    One likely won't get that good at surgery unless they practiced a lot. And if they had no interest towards that profession they likely won't be putting in crazy hours in their prime early career time becoming a surgeon. You can't even become good at flipping burgers without being interested in doing it.

rademacher 8y ago

Why penalize folks who didn't know what they wanted to do in high school. It took me a long time to get a vague idea of what I wanted to do for a career and it's something I have to constantly contend with. In fact, I'm still trying to pinpoint what exactly I'm looking for. I know things have changed in the last few years, to the point where high school kids are in pre-engineering or pre-cs programs and getting special instruction. As an aside, the advantages of knowing what you want early are huge assuming that you continue down that path for a long while. If we consider something like graduate school, knowing as a freshmen that you want a PhD means growing your network early, cozying up to professors to write recs, doing REUs. You could have someone figure out towards the end of undergrad that they want to continue on and really struggle to put together a compelling package even though they might be just as passionate or have just as much potential. Sorry that was kind of a rant.

HeavyStorm 8y ago

I think that the metaphor is wrong - comparing writing software with other fields such as medicine makes little sense: there's a lot of basic knowledge necessary to perform even the simplest steps as a doctor (or an engineer or a lawyer), meaning a higher barrier to entry. Software development is more easily compared to things such as cooking, playing some instrument or even writing. There's some knowledge and training involved but that can be learned very quickly and a lot of stuff can be done on intuition. There's been a number of geniuses composers who wrote songs at very young ages; there's potential for that in software as well. It doesn't means that more experience doesn't matter - whatever someone developed at an early age is bound to be worse than after more years of practice, but you can start programming very early. However, humans are complex and you can have boy geniuses and late comers that are equivalent.