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Knowing about CPU architecture and OS structure helps me to reason about the application code I write. Do I understand those things as much as someone who speci

Knowing about CPU architecture and OS structure helps me to reason about the application code I write. Do I understand those things as much as someone who specializes in them? No of course not. But a certain level of baseline knowledge does have its benefits.

treis 8y ago
Baseline? Sure. But that's not what med school is. It's the equivalent of a masters level course on a dozen different topics.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Medicine is more complicated than computing.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - treis 8y ago
    Is it? They seem to follow a pretty similar career arc. If you take a typical CS grad they're going to go through a couple years as a junior dev, couple more as a more senior one, and then five years or more in they are ready to be in charge of their own project. That's pretty similar to the intern -> resident -> attending pattern that doctors follow. Honestly, the biggest difference between having a career in programming and being a doctor is the gate keeping. In programming, you can drop out of high school and 20 years later be an expert in the field. There's a path for talented people to go from junior -> dev -> senior -> lead -> principle -> whatever. There's no path like that in medicine. Sure, as a nurse you can go from LPN -> RN -> NP but that's where it ends. Your only option at that point is to spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there's really no reason for that.
  - gbear605 8y ago
    They’re not directly comparable topics like that. A doctor definitely needs to know more than a computer scientist. But all of medicine compared to all of computer science is not an easy comparison to accurately make, since they’re both such broad topics - in medicine, everything from psychology to pharmocology to genetic engineering - in computer science, everything from transistors to complex mathematics to artificial intelligence safety. They’re both topics that are impossible for one human to understand in entirety, but society requires doctors to know a lot more of medicine.

treis 8y ago

Baseline? Sure. But that's not what med school is. It's the equivalent of a masters level course on a dozen different topics.

ams6110 8y ago
Medicine is more complicated than computing.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- treis 8y ago
  Is it? They seem to follow a pretty similar career arc. If you take a typical CS grad they're going to go through a couple years as a junior dev, couple more as a more senior one, and then five years or more in they are ready to be in charge of their own project. That's pretty similar to the intern -> resident -> attending pattern that doctors follow. Honestly, the biggest difference between having a career in programming and being a doctor is the gate keeping. In programming, you can drop out of high school and 20 years later be an expert in the field. There's a path for talented people to go from junior -> dev -> senior -> lead -> principle -> whatever. There's no path like that in medicine. Sure, as a nurse you can go from LPN -> RN -> NP but that's where it ends. Your only option at that point is to spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there's really no reason for that.
- gbear605 8y ago
  They’re not directly comparable topics like that. A doctor definitely needs to know more than a computer scientist. But all of medicine compared to all of computer science is not an easy comparison to accurately make, since they’re both such broad topics - in medicine, everything from psychology to pharmocology to genetic engineering - in computer science, everything from transistors to complex mathematics to artificial intelligence safety. They’re both topics that are impossible for one human to understand in entirety, but society requires doctors to know a lot more of medicine.