“Do you realize these systems are designed by respected doctors and product managers? They tell the programmers exactly what to do.” And here, in a nutshell, i

“Do you realize these systems are designed by respected doctors and product managers? They tell the programmers exactly what to do.” And here, in a nutshell, is EVERYTHING wrong in modern software development. Doctors are NOT programmers. If they were, they wouldn’t need to hire programmers: they’d write the solution themselves! Doctors are the domain experts. They understand medicine, and procedures in its current practice, and the reasons why things are done the way they are. Conversely, the programmers’ job is not to write code. Any monkey can do that. It is to learn the problem space; to extract from the domain experts sufficient knowledge and insight to understand those procedures and why they are as they are for themselves. And then, starting from there, synthesize a new solution that does it all better. And the PMs’ job is to mediate that learning process; to ensure both parties understand these objectives and keep them on track; and otherwise keep the hell out their way. Whereas current industry practice is for programmers to sit with their thumbs up their asses, expecting others to tell them exactly what to do so they don’t have to learn, while PMs micromanage all the minutae so never have to take responsibility for the house itself burning down. This is like civilian government telling military how to fight their war (e.g. Iraq War, 2003…2???), or the “Official European Joke” about Heaven and Hell. And not only are in the Hell part, the Programmers and PMs—who are supposed to be the highly-paid professional problem solvers here—really seem to believe that this hell we’re in is “How Things Should Be”; and thus only serve to multiply those problems instead. .. FFS, I eventually got so sick of it all that I taught myself how to program (ugh), just so I wouldn’t have to go through all these useless spanners any more. And, it pains me to say, software development is the first (and still only) career in my half-century of life where I’ve NOT felt crippled with Impostor Syndrome. Because the impostor, I realized, was everyone else.