6 ms·

Being a programmer will make me a better doctor

45 points by chmaynard 7y ago

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
I don't think most programmers I know would have a very winning bedside manner.
- tighter_wires 7y ago
  The latest generation of doctors don't have it either
- monksy 7y ago
  To a patient on life support.. did try turning it off and on? How's the healthcheck?
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    after death, to nurse: did you check if it's plugged in?
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Neither have many doctors I've interacted with. The God-complexes in some of those people is just incredible.
  - CyberFonic 7y ago
    Ditto for some programmers who exhibit mind-boggling levels of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    I'm just saying - poor bedside manner is a known problem, work on improving that, not bringing in another discipline that for some reason or other seems to have problems with sociability.
tpfour 7y ago
I have family who are MDs and I have been working with MDs for over 5 years. I have always felt the same, but usually MDs don't agree that much - feeling special is part of the meme I guess. I do feel, however, that the converse would not work as well: most MDs I met do not practice the "abstract" thinking that is required to be a successful programmer. But that's just my experience.
- cabernal 7y ago
  They sound more akin to kernel programmers.
booleandilemma 7y ago
Another example of the “everyone should learn to code” frenzy.
- keenmaster 7y ago
  Programming, like spoken language, is one way to express yourself. A lot of value is lost because otherwise apt people, with profound skill or potential in a given vertical like medicine, cannot express themselves in digital terms. Moreover, non-technical people use Excel in amazing ways. It would be better if they knew how to program. The volume and distribution of technical labor is becoming more and more of a bottleneck to innovation. Every year that we don’t systematically introduce people to programming is another year where we forsake large amounts of innovation, and the economic value lost compounds, just like investments compound. There must be a large national effort to introduce young people and adults to programming.
  - salawat 7y ago
    There is a curse there though. I've found fluency with how the computer actually works creates a great deal of friction with regards to trying to communicate with other people. I'm so tuned to there always being an underlying cause that even my day to day communication takes on aspects of subconscious Neuro- linguistic programming; I end up trying to constantly tease apart or divine the nature of the underlying semantic/experiential construction of relatively high level communication done with a new person. It's gotten so bad, I can't really comfortably engage in small talk, because to me, it feels like I'm fuzzing the other person and being fuzzed by them in return to the point I end up getting frustrated at the complete failure to set up meaningful communication. What this ends up looking like, is that with someone I know I can get into high throughput, deep conversations. If I don't know someone though, I end up having to noodle around and pry to desperately scrabble together enough information to put forth a credible attempt at meaningful communication where we both come out saying the same thing about the same thing to a high enough degree of confidence that I"m comfortable we formed a shared understanding. Also, any person that outright frustrates that calibration phase, or demonstrates excessive volatility in terms of being able to reliably recall things (see compulsive deceivers/gaslighters/liars) quickly finds themselves on a low priority tier for further communication in many instances. I don't like doing that, but every time I relent in the practice, I tend to get hurt.
monksy 7y ago
This is one of the frustrating things about what I have when I go to the doctor. As a developer, I generally want a lot of information in order to pose theories about what is going wrong. They always seem really annoyed by this.
- apl 7y ago
  Mainly because it is genuinely exhausting for any medical practitioner. That lots of patients "enjoy" googling symptoms and coming up with far-fetched self-diagnoses is a given. But couple that with the perceived intellectual superiority of (software) engineers and you get a recipe for disaster. It's the equivalent of a doctor leaning over your shoulder while you're coding and telling you to remove random keywords.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
    I don't think it's as bad as removing random keywords, but given how limited resources are in medicine, I can see how a provider wouldn't want to explain why every individual's hypothesis is likely incorrect. On the flip side, misdiagnoses are surprisingly common, and I think it's worthwhile for any provider to take a closer look if a patient has concerns. If anything, I think this illustrates how much we need to reorganize and improve medicine. It's not like medicine is alone in this respect either, many sectors are inefficient, but when medicine is life altering and can be life or death, it's pretty high on the list IMO.
  - fossuser 7y ago
    Yeah I don't buy this. Like any field I think there is a spectrum of quality and there are some really great doctors that know a lot, some really bad ones, and a lot of mediocre ones. I've had a doctor (in the bay area) tell me that I should smoke a cigarette instead of having coffee if I'm having trouble sleeping, but want to keep working on something. Another talk positively about the butter coffee guy. I think the main reason they don't talk about a lot of options is probably time constraint and the common case being right most of the time. This means if you're actually not a common case you're probably better off investing your own time to try and figure things out too. I like this article though, I think there is some similarity of style in troubleshooting software and disease diagnosis (just very different things to reason about).
pvaldes 7y ago
... but a worst surgeon. Too much of nintendonitis and you are out of the game.
alephnan 7y ago
Whatever happened to Barack Obama learning how to code?
choeger 7y ago
The huge, and frustrating, difference is that software is (almost always) deterministic and (in principle) can be fully understood. With enough time and money, I am positive that I can fix any bug you throw at me. Human illness on the other hand sadly often leaves one without a cure.
jdsully 7y ago
The thing I've learned dealing with professionals in other fields is that they just don't care as much as you do. The economics of their profession simply don't allow it. In software if you spend 8 hours fixing a bug that bug will be fixed for all future users of your software. Someone spending 8 hours to diagnose a medical condition will surely be meaningful to you but won't help the rest of the people in the waiting room. Further most people do not have exotic illnesses or needs so rarely is such detailed diagnosis necessary. If you want someone to fix your car right rather than just replace random parts, or to give you detailed medical attention be prepared to search a long time to find someone willing to do so.
- hhs 7y ago
  > The economics of their profession simply don't allow it. Indeed, the FT wrote this morning that in this situation concierge medicine is booming in NY. If interested: https://www.ft.com/content/09b48bce-67fd-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75 https://www.ft.com/content/09b48bce-67fd-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  I feel the same way about taxes, medicine, and real-estate: there are professionals out there who are more baseline-skilled than I am, but there's absolutely nobody on earth who cares about MY problems as much as I do. In the average professional-personal interaction, they are getting... 5% of the margin from their intervention? 10 at most? Whereas 90% of the benefit goes to me. So there's a VERY quick diminishing return to their time investment, in a way that is not true for me. Example: real estate agent. They get 3% of the cut, I get 97%. Should they spend 2x as much time to increase the sale price 20%? No, that's not efficient for them, but it IS worth it for me. If you're dealing with a professional who is MUCH more knowledgeable than you, it's worth it to take their advice, because they can do a better job. But at the margin, it's often worth investing the time to do deep research. Nobody will ever care about your problems as much as you do, and it shows.
- ken 7y ago
  It must depend on the industry. My experience is the opposite. I've had programming jobs where every single day consisted of me running into a bug and wanting to fix it, and my manager saying there's no ROI in that and I need to add new features instead like The Roadmap says. After switching to the physical world, there's definitely an understanding that while we shouldn't be slow, we should take as long as needed to do the job right. If we screw up, people could die. As they say: "OSHA regulations are written in blood."
ken 7y ago
Replace "programmer" and "doctor" with almost any other professions and it would be just as true. Strategies like "Break problems into sub-problems" is in no way specific to these fields. You might as well say "Being a carpenter will make me a better CEO", and for exactly the same reasons.
hashmymustache 7y ago
Eh, as a doctor with an engineering background who does a lot of programming projects on the side and feels confident in both roles, they’re very different skill sets and I wouldn’t say it makes me a better doctor. If you go into a non-patient facing area like radiology or pathogy you can leverage it into improved toolchains with AI assistance, but you also don’t have to be a programmer to incorporate technology into your practice.
CyberFonic 7y ago
I presume that you mean "medical" doctor. I also presume that this is a hypothetical statement. You have not completed your medical training. Would be very interesting to read about your experiences once you have become a doctor and then putting the two professional experiences into relative context.
smabie 7y ago
"Based on the patient's past history of seasonal allergies and the high pollen count that day, most signs seemed to indicate that there was nothing to worry about. But--in order to rule out the unlikely "edge case" that the patient had contracted an acute viral infection that could become serious when his immune system was suppressed by chemotherapy--my advisor made sure to run tests for several common bugs before starting treatment." And that's the problem: thinking like this as a programmer is cheap and fast; as a doctor it is slow and very expensive. I for one would prefer a very cheap doctor that didn't think like this most of the time. Unfortunately, massive malpractice settlements will always hinder the goal of cheap healthcare.

45 points by chmaynard 7y ago

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

I don't think most programmers I know would have a very winning bedside manner.

tighter_wires 7y ago
The latest generation of doctors don't have it either
monksy 7y ago
To a patient on life support.. did try turning it off and on? How's the healthcheck?
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  after death, to nurse: did you check if it's plugged in?
save_ferris 7y ago
Neither have many doctors I've interacted with. The God-complexes in some of those people is just incredible.
- CyberFonic 7y ago
  Ditto for some programmers who exhibit mind-boggling levels of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  I'm just saying - poor bedside manner is a known problem, work on improving that, not bringing in another discipline that for some reason or other seems to have problems with sociability.

tpfour 7y ago

I have family who are MDs and I have been working with MDs for over 5 years. I have always felt the same, but usually MDs don't agree that much - feeling special is part of the meme I guess. I do feel, however, that the converse would not work as well: most MDs I met do not practice the "abstract" thinking that is required to be a successful programmer. But that's just my experience.

cabernal 7y ago
They sound more akin to kernel programmers.

booleandilemma 7y ago

Another example of the “everyone should learn to code” frenzy.

keenmaster 7y ago
Programming, like spoken language, is one way to express yourself. A lot of value is lost because otherwise apt people, with profound skill or potential in a given vertical like medicine, cannot express themselves in digital terms. Moreover, non-technical people use Excel in amazing ways. It would be better if they knew how to program. The volume and distribution of technical labor is becoming more and more of a bottleneck to innovation. Every year that we don’t systematically introduce people to programming is another year where we forsake large amounts of innovation, and the economic value lost compounds, just like investments compound. There must be a large national effort to introduce young people and adults to programming.
- salawat 7y ago
  There is a curse there though. I've found fluency with how the computer actually works creates a great deal of friction with regards to trying to communicate with other people. I'm so tuned to there always being an underlying cause that even my day to day communication takes on aspects of subconscious Neuro- linguistic programming; I end up trying to constantly tease apart or divine the nature of the underlying semantic/experiential construction of relatively high level communication done with a new person. It's gotten so bad, I can't really comfortably engage in small talk, because to me, it feels like I'm fuzzing the other person and being fuzzed by them in return to the point I end up getting frustrated at the complete failure to set up meaningful communication. What this ends up looking like, is that with someone I know I can get into high throughput, deep conversations. If I don't know someone though, I end up having to noodle around and pry to desperately scrabble together enough information to put forth a credible attempt at meaningful communication where we both come out saying the same thing about the same thing to a high enough degree of confidence that I"m comfortable we formed a shared understanding. Also, any person that outright frustrates that calibration phase, or demonstrates excessive volatility in terms of being able to reliably recall things (see compulsive deceivers/gaslighters/liars) quickly finds themselves on a low priority tier for further communication in many instances. I don't like doing that, but every time I relent in the practice, I tend to get hurt.

monksy 7y ago

This is one of the frustrating things about what I have when I go to the doctor. As a developer, I generally want a lot of information in order to pose theories about what is going wrong. They always seem really annoyed by this.

apl 7y ago
Mainly because it is genuinely exhausting for any medical practitioner. That lots of patients "enjoy" googling symptoms and coming up with far-fetched self-diagnoses is a given. But couple that with the perceived intellectual superiority of (software) engineers and you get a recipe for disaster. It's the equivalent of a doctor leaning over your shoulder while you're coding and telling you to remove random keywords.
- omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
  I don't think it's as bad as removing random keywords, but given how limited resources are in medicine, I can see how a provider wouldn't want to explain why every individual's hypothesis is likely incorrect. On the flip side, misdiagnoses are surprisingly common, and I think it's worthwhile for any provider to take a closer look if a patient has concerns. If anything, I think this illustrates how much we need to reorganize and improve medicine. It's not like medicine is alone in this respect either, many sectors are inefficient, but when medicine is life altering and can be life or death, it's pretty high on the list IMO.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Yeah I don't buy this. Like any field I think there is a spectrum of quality and there are some really great doctors that know a lot, some really bad ones, and a lot of mediocre ones. I've had a doctor (in the bay area) tell me that I should smoke a cigarette instead of having coffee if I'm having trouble sleeping, but want to keep working on something. Another talk positively about the butter coffee guy. I think the main reason they don't talk about a lot of options is probably time constraint and the common case being right most of the time. This means if you're actually not a common case you're probably better off investing your own time to try and figure things out too. I like this article though, I think there is some similarity of style in troubleshooting software and disease diagnosis (just very different things to reason about).

pvaldes 7y ago

... but a worst surgeon. Too much of nintendonitis and you are out of the game.

alephnan 7y ago

Whatever happened to Barack Obama learning how to code?

choeger 7y ago

The huge, and frustrating, difference is that software is (almost always) deterministic and (in principle) can be fully understood. With enough time and money, I am positive that I can fix any bug you throw at me. Human illness on the other hand sadly often leaves one without a cure.

jdsully 7y ago

The thing I've learned dealing with professionals in other fields is that they just don't care as much as you do. The economics of their profession simply don't allow it. In software if you spend 8 hours fixing a bug that bug will be fixed for all future users of your software. Someone spending 8 hours to diagnose a medical condition will surely be meaningful to you but won't help the rest of the people in the waiting room. Further most people do not have exotic illnesses or needs so rarely is such detailed diagnosis necessary. If you want someone to fix your car right rather than just replace random parts, or to give you detailed medical attention be prepared to search a long time to find someone willing to do so.

hhs 7y ago
> The economics of their profession simply don't allow it. Indeed, the FT wrote this morning that in this situation concierge medicine is booming in NY. If interested: https://www.ft.com/content/09b48bce-67fd-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75 https://www.ft.com/content/09b48bce-67fd-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...
bpodgursky 7y ago
I feel the same way about taxes, medicine, and real-estate: there are professionals out there who are more baseline-skilled than I am, but there's absolutely nobody on earth who cares about MY problems as much as I do. In the average professional-personal interaction, they are getting... 5% of the margin from their intervention? 10 at most? Whereas 90% of the benefit goes to me. So there's a VERY quick diminishing return to their time investment, in a way that is not true for me. Example: real estate agent. They get 3% of the cut, I get 97%. Should they spend 2x as much time to increase the sale price 20%? No, that's not efficient for them, but it IS worth it for me. If you're dealing with a professional who is MUCH more knowledgeable than you, it's worth it to take their advice, because they can do a better job. But at the margin, it's often worth investing the time to do deep research. Nobody will ever care about your problems as much as you do, and it shows.
ken 7y ago
It must depend on the industry. My experience is the opposite. I've had programming jobs where every single day consisted of me running into a bug and wanting to fix it, and my manager saying there's no ROI in that and I need to add new features instead like The Roadmap says. After switching to the physical world, there's definitely an understanding that while we shouldn't be slow, we should take as long as needed to do the job right. If we screw up, people could die. As they say: "OSHA regulations are written in blood."

ken 7y ago

Replace "programmer" and "doctor" with almost any other professions and it would be just as true. Strategies like "Break problems into sub-problems" is in no way specific to these fields. You might as well say "Being a carpenter will make me a better CEO", and for exactly the same reasons.

hashmymustache 7y ago

Eh, as a doctor with an engineering background who does a lot of programming projects on the side and feels confident in both roles, they’re very different skill sets and I wouldn’t say it makes me a better doctor. If you go into a non-patient facing area like radiology or pathogy you can leverage it into improved toolchains with AI assistance, but you also don’t have to be a programmer to incorporate technology into your practice.

CyberFonic 7y ago

I presume that you mean "medical" doctor. I also presume that this is a hypothetical statement. You have not completed your medical training. Would be very interesting to read about your experiences once you have become a doctor and then putting the two professional experiences into relative context.

smabie 7y ago

"Based on the patient's past history of seasonal allergies and the high pollen count that day, most signs seemed to indicate that there was nothing to worry about. But--in order to rule out the unlikely "edge case" that the patient had contracted an acute viral infection that could become serious when his immune system was suppressed by chemotherapy--my advisor made sure to run tests for several common bugs before starting treatment." And that's the problem: thinking like this as a programmer is cheap and fast; as a doctor it is slow and very expensive. I for one would prefer a very cheap doctor that didn't think like this most of the time. Unfortunately, massive malpractice settlements will always hinder the goal of cheap healthcare.