12 ms·

If doctors were interviewed like software developers

78 points by Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

_qulr 6y ago
I don't think doctors are a useful analogy for software developers. You mention doctors, then people are going to say "we need licensing for software developers" (which for the majority of programming jobs is silly IMO), and the conversation goes off the rails. Doctors are an unusual profession, leave it at that.
- TwistedWeasel 6y ago
  plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements. Why is software different?
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Because their fields are mature. Practitioner fundamentals haven't changed in decades, often not even in centuries.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      And scope-limited in comparison.
    - TwistedWeasel 6y ago
      How do you define mature? Is it about stability? There are newer and more modern methods of construction and engineering and the field is always evolving. Maturity in those fields is about consistency and agreements of best practices enforced by standards and regulations. Software is not mature because it's not regulated. If you want software engineering to mature and stabilize, it needs more regulation.
      - tpmx 6y ago
        Yes, construction etc is evolving, but it's doing that as such a slow pace compared to software engineering.
        TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        Are you sure? Construction materials are evolving and changing every few years (engineered lumber, modern environmentally friendly methods, etc) whilst we still use base operating systems designed in the 60's for most of our services.
        tpmx 6y ago
        Take a look at a house built [100, 50, 25] years ago. Compare it to a house built today. Then do the same exercise with some piece of software.
        TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        yep, both are significantly different in many way, houses built 50 years ago have a lot of differences to modern houses. Software from 50 years ago, is also significantly different but the fundamentals of both are the same, foundations, walls, roof trusses, siding, filesystems, operating systems, processes, threads, data structures etc. We may use Go instead of C and we may use engineered lumber instead of Douglas Fir for door headers.
        tpmx 6y ago
        Go vs C: That's 50 years. Wooden house building fundementals: That's like 200-500 years.
        TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        last 50 years of change includes modern nail guns, engineered lumber, hurricane anchors, plywood roof sheathing, vapor barriers, and countless other differences in how homes are built and the tools we use to do it. There is nothing special about software, other industries also evolve and grow their methods and tools. We just change software with reckless abandon and little regard for the reasons we started down any given path in the first place.
  - johnnyfaehell 6y ago
    Chances of people dying from my web app is super slim. Chances of people dying because I bladly wired their house is and it caught fire is a lot higher. Chances of me dying while developing my web app is super slim. Chances of someone frying themselves with wiring something up when they don't know how is a lot higher.
    - b20000 6y ago
      I will leave this right here for your education - https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster
      - henryfjordan 6y ago
        To GP's point, nobody died in that disaster. A much better example would have been the Therac-25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
        brlewis 6y ago
        These two examples are interesting. They're both cases where what was being created was a system where software was an important component, as opposed to the software written by the vast majority of us where the hardware components of the system are always the same (monitor, keyboard, etc.) This is the same distinction in Diamond v Diehr for when software might be included in a patent. I always thought the US Supreme Court made a good decision there. Unfortunately they were later overruled by lower courts. (For legal experts out there about to correct me and say that lower courts can't overrule higher courts, I wish you were right.)
        b20000 6y ago
        sorry, it doesn't matter
      - bigwavedave 6y ago
        GP doesn't say it's never happened, just that the typical programmer isn't going to kill someone with a buggy password complexity validator. By and large, the standard programmer does not hold life and death in their hands when navigating callback hell.
  - b20000 6y ago
    exactly - it is time for the computer science and software engineering professions to have trade orgs and unions so those who are qualified can practice the profession and get paid and respected like other professions that require years of college education.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements. These are almost exclusively local regulations, not US national requirements, and certainly not international. So even if there were licensing, whose jurisdiction applies? What if you have distributed software development teams?
    - itake 6y ago
      This is a solved problem per our tax laws. Just because you write code that runs on a server in another state, doesn't mean you pay the taxes in that state.
      - _qulr 6y ago
        Different states have dramatically different taxes. Some states have no income taxes. So in one sense, it's a "solved problem", with the solution being that licensing requirements would be dramatically different based on locality, but in the sense that people want — a uniform standard for hiring software developers — it's not solved at all.
        itake 6y ago
        > but in the sense that people want — a uniform standard for hiring software developers — it's not solved at all. Exact same thing can be said about the hiring process in general. Taxes and employment legal contracts vary from state to state. I am sure employers would love a single contract, no matter where they hire an individual, but that is not currently the case.
    - TwistedWeasel 6y ago
      It's complicated so we should just not care?
      - _qulr 6y ago
        I think "Why is software different?" is the wrong question. Why is software the same? Most professions don't need professional licensing, and it's not clear that the economy would be served well by adding licensing requirements.
  - house9-2 6y ago
    > plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements. Why is software different? There are plenty of journeyman carpenters that do not have a license, this is not a problem as long as they work for a company that is licensed.
    - baumandm 6y ago
      You're making an argument in favor of software engineering licensing, just not that every individual involved needs to be licensed.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    All these roles have certain code they have to work to. A plumber can't just go into a home and install something outside of code. Software is generally rather ephemeral and without a code to write or build to. We have "best practices". Yes, some software is built under engineering assumptions - airplane software, etc. NASA has a standard they write code to and software engineers are expected to work within these confines. Part of the code requires reviews of written software, etc. [1] [1] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/software-assurance/2019/08/30/nasa-software-engineering-requirements-now-in-effect https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/software-assurance/2019...
    - anon73044 6y ago
      >A plumber can't just go into a home and install something outside of code. That is....not true at all. A plumber/carpenter/electrician works to code under threat of losing their license. Additionally your building could be exempt from code for numerous reasons (grandfathered/historical, outside of city limits and no county building codes/etc.) Developers and Software Engineers don't have this threat.
      - nemo44x 6y ago
        Right, if they continue to do things short of code (when required, etc) they'd lose their license. They have to work within the confines of the code, where applicable. Software engineers will certainly lose their job if they don't ship code to standards set by the company they work for. Someone writing code for an airplane is going to have a different type of standard than someone writing code for video game, however. Why would it make sense for a government agency to set a code for software? It literally makes no sense as different problems have different requirements.
        TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        Left up to private enterprise they will set their standards to the lowest they can get away with to maximize profits and reduce the time to market.
- oksurewhynot 6y ago
  someone didn't watch the video
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
ogre_codes 6y ago
"We have a lot of redheaded patients, we're looking for someone who has at least 7 years experience working with redheaded patients on a regular basis"
- Veuxdo 6y ago
  Might apply to dermatologists. Maybe. Well, probably not.
  - ch4s3 6y ago
    could be relevant in pain management or anesthesiology[1]. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  Don't forget something like: "We're looking for a senior doctor with 10 years of COVID-19 experience."
  - user5994461 6y ago
    That one is possible if you were there during the SARS or MERS epidemics, they're also coronavirus that you could easily sell as COVID experience.
    - theandrewbailey 6y ago
      Maybe, but that reminds me of a recruiter or HR rep saying "Java and Javascript are like the same thing, right?"
  - normaljoe 6y ago
    I have thrown out resumes claiming the same. Explain how you have more years experience then the age of the tech. LOLZ.
- sa46 6y ago
aphextron 6y ago
If software developers were interviewed like doctors: "Oh, you don't have a graduate degree? Why did you even bother applying here?"
lacker 6y ago
On the other hand, if software engineers were interviewed like doctors, anyone who didn’t have a U.S. graduate degree would be immediately rejected. Anyone with great experience in another country would be immediately rejected. That is most of the good doctors in the world! The doctor interviewing process is simplified by rejecting the vast majority of qualified candidates before even interviewing them. I think the field of software engineering is doing quite well with its interviewing compared to other fields. Having all of these rigorous interviews sometimes ends up evaluating people based on things that shouldn’t be so important, but the upside is that you can be far less reliant on credentials.
- user5994461 6y ago
  I'd love if software required a degree. I have a degree and pretty much everybody I ever worked with has a degree. Looking around the entire floor there's only one person without a degree I am aware of. It's a myth that you can work without a degree, you'd never get a job interview in the first place. Seems to be mostly a US myth by the way, makes sense because degrees are crazy expensive there.
  - raziel2p 6y ago
    This just sounds like a heavy dose of confirmation and/or affinity bias. The best developers I've worked with had no degree at all or a degree in something completely separate from development. I think a healthy mix of both academic and purely practical experience is the best.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      I will reply to this comment since this is probably the most relevant. You're on point that there is a personal bias. Developers without degrees congregate together where they can, while developers with degrees congregate together to other places. There is a major self selection. Saw a lot of the first when I was doing contracting in the UK, saw a lot of the later as permanent in tech companies. If you're interviewing for google you're way more likely to have 2 stanford majors in the interview panel than 2 developers without format education.
jwatzman 6y ago
Original source: https://twitter.com/EmilyKager/status/1313303791186268160 https://twitter.com/EmilyKager/status/1313303791186268160
b20000 6y ago
hahaha this post is pure gold and should be the top post on HN.
zerr 6y ago
On a similar note, there was a satirical interview about hiring a carpenter with an experience working on brown rounded rectangles or something like that - can anyone find it?
- dudeinhawaii 6y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_carpenters_were_hired_like_programmers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_...
hardwaregeek 6y ago
If getting into school for CS was as hard as med school applications, we wouldn't need tech interviews. Also you totally need to do unpaid bullshit to become a doctor! Plenty of med students have to volunteer at clinics or do unpaid/low paid lab jobs. I don't get this assumption that other careers don't have bullshit unpaid labor. Pretty much every career requires some.
mark-r 6y ago
The best part is the strong finish.
sxp 6y ago
If doctors were really interviewed like programmers, it would be possible to get into top medical position without a major degree. I only have a BS in computer engineering from a mid-tier college, but I was able to get into two FAANGs based on passing the interviews and using skills I learned outside of college. And I know people in similar positions who have a worse formal education but were also able to get into positions that pay better than most doctors in the US because they were able to teach themselves the required skills and learn the rest on the job. This doctor vs programmer comparison would also be more useful if there was an order of magnitude difference in effectiveness of doctors. Compare that with the order of magnitude difference in the utility of the systems that programmers can build. There are no real "10x" doctors except for those with medical + management training that can do things like set up a new hospital in an impoverished country and revamp their medical system. But it's much more likely to have programmers that can build systems with many orders of magnitude difference in terms of QPS or a similar utility metric. That is, there is no version of Big-O notation for doctors that matters as much as the big O notation for programmers.
- user5994461 6y ago
  What is your salary? What is the salary of a doctor? You're probably aware of the first but not the second. Just so you know, doctors are not paid little and developers are really not paid that much in comparison. You should also consider that FANG are 4 extremely selective companies only existing in the valley (the cream of the crop) while doctors can work pretty much anywhere in a country and do very well.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    For the hours they have to work and the conditions they have to work in... doctors are paid ok. You'd have to pay me a hell of a lot to have to drive to a hospital each morning and stand around on my feet for a 48-hour shift dealing with high-risk problems and real people all day. No thanks. I think they do it for pretty reasonable compensation considering.
    - user5994461 6y ago
Dumblydorr 6y ago
The difference is we entrust doctors with ethical and moral power predicated on hundreds of innovations which can kill or harm their patients. In contrast, we entrust SWEs with massively scaled applications with moral and ethical implications that can lead to societal change like misinformation and indirect death. Hmmm.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
Medicine does have a strong culture of ongoing technical interviewing. The OSCI is done on a weekly basis by most first and second-year medical students in the US. By the time you come in contact with real patients (as a student), you've done the equivalent of nearly a hundred technical interviews. It's increasingly common to be doing them both in Spanish and English as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_structured_clinical_examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_structured_clinical_... "It is designed to test clinical skill performance and competence in skills such as communication, clinical examination, medical procedures prescription, exercise prescription, joint mobilisation/manipulation techniques, radiographic positioning, radiographic image evaluation, and interpretation of results." "An OSCE usually comprises a circuit of short (the usual is 5–10 minutes although some use up to 15 minute) stations, in which each candidate is examined on a one-to-one basis with one or two impartial examiner(s) and either real or simulated (actors or electronic patient simulators) patients. Each station has a different examiner, as opposed to the traditional method of clinical examinations where a candidate would be assigned to an examiner for the entire examination. Candidates rotate through the stations, completing all the stations on their circuit. In this way, all candidates take the same stations. It is considered to be an improvement over traditional examination methods because the stations can be standardised enabling fairer peer comparison and complex procedures can be assessed without endangering patients health."
chrisseaton 6y ago
Doctors do have side projects, though. I even worked with a doctor on a mutual side project https://chrisseaton.com/merseyburns/ https://chrisseaton.com/merseyburns/. And guess what? Based on the strength of that side project the doctors I worked with now have jobs related to what they did in the side project! It's literally no different.
jbandela1 6y ago
Actually, these kind of stuff do get asked at the various interviews to becoming a doctor. * Working for free because it is a passion. Actually a big part of the medical school interview is making sure you are passionate about medicine. You are pretty much expected to be doing some type of medical volunteering on an ongoing basis to demonstrate your passion. In addition, once you are in medical school, interviewing for residency, demonstrating passion by volunteering or leading a journal club is often a big boost to your chances. * Whiteboards As part of the USMLE (US Medical License Exam) there is a clinical skills section. You go into a recorded room with a standardized patient who pretends to have a certain illness. You are expected to ask them the right questions and do the correct exam. You are graded on how well you do. In addition, before you can get board certified in your specialty (especially in surgery) and be allowed to practice on your own without any supervision, you undergo what are called oral exams. It is kind of like whiteboarding. There you are given hypothetical patient cases and are asked to walk through how you would diagnose it. What questions will you ask, what exams would you do, what imaging or other tests would you order. You are also asked about your treatment plan. If you are a surgeon, you will be asked to walk through how you would do the surgery, including what type of incision and the surgical approach. The examiners may throw in some complications (such as a lot of bleeding) and ask how you would deal with it. In reality, the medical doctor interviews are much more demanding than the software developer interviews. Source: I am a medical doctor and software developer and have done both the doctor interviews and the whiteboard interviews.
- isochronous 6y ago
  There's a big difference between job interviews and school interviews/oral exams, though.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    Somehow I feel like you're right, but when I think about it I can't really think of why. What is actually different? The only major distinction I can come up with is that part of a job interview is seeing if you fit well with the culture of the company.
juancn 6y ago
On the other hand, if software developer were trained as doctors... Doctors spend many years doing hands-on work under more experienced doctors, free clinic hours, 30+ hours shifts, lot's of grunt work and specializing on a very narrow field. They end up training for 10-15 years at least before they can really be independent. Lots of people show up at software engineering interviews with barely any training, and sometimes with really bad habits. If you do a lot of interviewing, you'll find there's many people who have been working for years, basically ripping off employers, and in many ways they're unaware of their shortcomings. The saddest cases are when you have someone with some seniority, smart and some potential, but they grew up alone (to put it somehow). Either without a mentor (where they're smart but work in a vacuum) or with a bad mentor and picked enough bad habits to make them dangerous. They have so many things to unlearn, that you should hire them for a much junior position than their resume experience would indicate. In general that's a no hire situation, it's much better to hire inexperienced developers and just train them properly.
reportgunner 6y ago
There are many professions we could compare to each other. This is just a passive aggressive way to deal with not having side projects.

78 points by Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

I don't think doctors are a useful analogy for software developers. You mention doctors, then people are going to say "we need licensing for software developers" (which for the majority of programming jobs is silly IMO), and the conversation goes off the rails. Doctors are an unusual profession, leave it at that.

TwistedWeasel 6y ago
plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements. Why is software different?
- tpmx 6y ago
  Because their fields are mature. Practitioner fundamentals haven't changed in decades, often not even in centuries.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    And scope-limited in comparison.
  - TwistedWeasel 6y ago
    How do you define mature? Is it about stability? There are newer and more modern methods of construction and engineering and the field is always evolving. Maturity in those fields is about consistency and agreements of best practices enforced by standards and regulations. Software is not mature because it's not regulated. If you want software engineering to mature and stabilize, it needs more regulation.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      Yes, construction etc is evolving, but it's doing that as such a slow pace compared to software engineering.
      - TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        Are you sure? Construction materials are evolving and changing every few years (engineered lumber, modern environmentally friendly methods, etc) whilst we still use base operating systems designed in the 60's for most of our services.
        tpmx 6y ago
        Take a look at a house built [100, 50, 25] years ago. Compare it to a house built today. Then do the same exercise with some piece of software.
        TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        yep, both are significantly different in many way, houses built 50 years ago have a lot of differences to modern houses. Software from 50 years ago, is also significantly different but the fundamentals of both are the same, foundations, walls, roof trusses, siding, filesystems, operating systems, processes, threads, data structures etc. We may use Go instead of C and we may use engineered lumber instead of Douglas Fir for door headers.
        tpmx 6y ago
        Go vs C: That's 50 years. Wooden house building fundementals: That's like 200-500 years.
        TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        last 50 years of change includes modern nail guns, engineered lumber, hurricane anchors, plywood roof sheathing, vapor barriers, and countless other differences in how homes are built and the tools we use to do it. There is nothing special about software, other industries also evolve and grow their methods and tools. We just change software with reckless abandon and little regard for the reasons we started down any given path in the first place.
- johnnyfaehell 6y ago
  Chances of people dying from my web app is super slim. Chances of people dying because I bladly wired their house is and it caught fire is a lot higher. Chances of me dying while developing my web app is super slim. Chances of someone frying themselves with wiring something up when they don't know how is a lot higher.
  - b20000 6y ago
    I will leave this right here for your education - https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster
    - henryfjordan 6y ago
      To GP's point, nobody died in that disaster. A much better example would have been the Therac-25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
      - brlewis 6y ago
        These two examples are interesting. They're both cases where what was being created was a system where software was an important component, as opposed to the software written by the vast majority of us where the hardware components of the system are always the same (monitor, keyboard, etc.) This is the same distinction in Diamond v Diehr for when software might be included in a patent. I always thought the US Supreme Court made a good decision there. Unfortunately they were later overruled by lower courts. (For legal experts out there about to correct me and say that lower courts can't overrule higher courts, I wish you were right.)
        b20000 6y ago
        sorry, it doesn't matter
    - bigwavedave 6y ago
      GP doesn't say it's never happened, just that the typical programmer isn't going to kill someone with a buggy password complexity validator. By and large, the standard programmer does not hold life and death in their hands when navigating callback hell.
- b20000 6y ago
  exactly - it is time for the computer science and software engineering professions to have trade orgs and unions so those who are qualified can practice the profession and get paid and respected like other professions that require years of college education.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- _qulr 6y ago
  > plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements. These are almost exclusively local regulations, not US national requirements, and certainly not international. So even if there were licensing, whose jurisdiction applies? What if you have distributed software development teams?
  - itake 6y ago
    This is a solved problem per our tax laws. Just because you write code that runs on a server in another state, doesn't mean you pay the taxes in that state.
    - _qulr 6y ago
      Different states have dramatically different taxes. Some states have no income taxes. So in one sense, it's a "solved problem", with the solution being that licensing requirements would be dramatically different based on locality, but in the sense that people want — a uniform standard for hiring software developers — it's not solved at all.
      - itake 6y ago
        > but in the sense that people want — a uniform standard for hiring software developers — it's not solved at all. Exact same thing can be said about the hiring process in general. Taxes and employment legal contracts vary from state to state. I am sure employers would love a single contract, no matter where they hire an individual, but that is not currently the case.
  - TwistedWeasel 6y ago
    It's complicated so we should just not care?
    - _qulr 6y ago
      I think "Why is software different?" is the wrong question. Why is software the same? Most professions don't need professional licensing, and it's not clear that the economy would be served well by adding licensing requirements.
- house9-2 6y ago
  > plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements. Why is software different? There are plenty of journeyman carpenters that do not have a license, this is not a problem as long as they work for a company that is licensed.
  - baumandm 6y ago
    You're making an argument in favor of software engineering licensing, just not that every individual involved needs to be licensed.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  All these roles have certain code they have to work to. A plumber can't just go into a home and install something outside of code. Software is generally rather ephemeral and without a code to write or build to. We have "best practices". Yes, some software is built under engineering assumptions - airplane software, etc. NASA has a standard they write code to and software engineers are expected to work within these confines. Part of the code requires reviews of written software, etc. [1] [1] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/software-assurance/2019/08/30/nasa-software-engineering-requirements-now-in-effect https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/software-assurance/2019...
  - anon73044 6y ago
    >A plumber can't just go into a home and install something outside of code. That is....not true at all. A plumber/carpenter/electrician works to code under threat of losing their license. Additionally your building could be exempt from code for numerous reasons (grandfathered/historical, outside of city limits and no county building codes/etc.) Developers and Software Engineers don't have this threat.
    - nemo44x 6y ago
      Right, if they continue to do things short of code (when required, etc) they'd lose their license. They have to work within the confines of the code, where applicable. Software engineers will certainly lose their job if they don't ship code to standards set by the company they work for. Someone writing code for an airplane is going to have a different type of standard than someone writing code for video game, however. Why would it make sense for a government agency to set a code for software? It literally makes no sense as different problems have different requirements.
      - TwistedWeasel 6y ago
        Left up to private enterprise they will set their standards to the lowest they can get away with to maximize profits and reduce the time to market.
oksurewhynot 6y ago
someone didn't watch the video
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ogre_codes 6y ago

"We have a lot of redheaded patients, we're looking for someone who has at least 7 years experience working with redheaded patients on a regular basis"

Veuxdo 6y ago
Might apply to dermatologists. Maybe. Well, probably not.
- ch4s3 6y ago
  could be relevant in pain management or anesthesiology[1]. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956
theandrewbailey 6y ago
Don't forget something like: "We're looking for a senior doctor with 10 years of COVID-19 experience."
- user5994461 6y ago
  That one is possible if you were there during the SARS or MERS epidemics, they're also coronavirus that you could easily sell as COVID experience.
  - theandrewbailey 6y ago
    Maybe, but that reminds me of a recruiter or HR rep saying "Java and Javascript are like the same thing, right?"
- normaljoe 6y ago
  I have thrown out resumes claiming the same. Explain how you have more years experience then the age of the tech. LOLZ.
sa46 6y ago

aphextron 6y ago

If software developers were interviewed like doctors: "Oh, you don't have a graduate degree? Why did you even bother applying here?"

lacker 6y ago

On the other hand, if software engineers were interviewed like doctors, anyone who didn’t have a U.S. graduate degree would be immediately rejected. Anyone with great experience in another country would be immediately rejected. That is most of the good doctors in the world! The doctor interviewing process is simplified by rejecting the vast majority of qualified candidates before even interviewing them. I think the field of software engineering is doing quite well with its interviewing compared to other fields. Having all of these rigorous interviews sometimes ends up evaluating people based on things that shouldn’t be so important, but the upside is that you can be far less reliant on credentials.

user5994461 6y ago
I'd love if software required a degree. I have a degree and pretty much everybody I ever worked with has a degree. Looking around the entire floor there's only one person without a degree I am aware of. It's a myth that you can work without a degree, you'd never get a job interview in the first place. Seems to be mostly a US myth by the way, makes sense because degrees are crazy expensive there.
- raziel2p 6y ago
  This just sounds like a heavy dose of confirmation and/or affinity bias. The best developers I've worked with had no degree at all or a degree in something completely separate from development. I think a healthy mix of both academic and purely practical experience is the best.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    I will reply to this comment since this is probably the most relevant. You're on point that there is a personal bias. Developers without degrees congregate together where they can, while developers with degrees congregate together to other places. There is a major self selection. Saw a lot of the first when I was doing contracting in the UK, saw a lot of the later as permanent in tech companies. If you're interviewing for google you're way more likely to have 2 stanford majors in the interview panel than 2 developers without format education.

jwatzman 6y ago

Original source: https://twitter.com/EmilyKager/status/1313303791186268160 https://twitter.com/EmilyKager/status/1313303791186268160

b20000 6y ago

hahaha this post is pure gold and should be the top post on HN.

zerr 6y ago

On a similar note, there was a satirical interview about hiring a carpenter with an experience working on brown rounded rectangles or something like that - can anyone find it?

dudeinhawaii 6y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_carpenters_were_hired_like_programmers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_...

hardwaregeek 6y ago

If getting into school for CS was as hard as med school applications, we wouldn't need tech interviews. Also you totally need to do unpaid bullshit to become a doctor! Plenty of med students have to volunteer at clinics or do unpaid/low paid lab jobs. I don't get this assumption that other careers don't have bullshit unpaid labor. Pretty much every career requires some.

mark-r 6y ago

The best part is the strong finish.

sxp 6y ago

If doctors were really interviewed like programmers, it would be possible to get into top medical position without a major degree. I only have a BS in computer engineering from a mid-tier college, but I was able to get into two FAANGs based on passing the interviews and using skills I learned outside of college. And I know people in similar positions who have a worse formal education but were also able to get into positions that pay better than most doctors in the US because they were able to teach themselves the required skills and learn the rest on the job. This doctor vs programmer comparison would also be more useful if there was an order of magnitude difference in effectiveness of doctors. Compare that with the order of magnitude difference in the utility of the systems that programmers can build. There are no real "10x" doctors except for those with medical + management training that can do things like set up a new hospital in an impoverished country and revamp their medical system. But it's much more likely to have programmers that can build systems with many orders of magnitude difference in terms of QPS or a similar utility metric. That is, there is no version of Big-O notation for doctors that matters as much as the big O notation for programmers.

user5994461 6y ago
What is your salary? What is the salary of a doctor? You're probably aware of the first but not the second. Just so you know, doctors are not paid little and developers are really not paid that much in comparison. You should also consider that FANG are 4 extremely selective companies only existing in the valley (the cream of the crop) while doctors can work pretty much anywhere in a country and do very well.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  For the hours they have to work and the conditions they have to work in... doctors are paid ok. You'd have to pay me a hell of a lot to have to drive to a hospital each morning and stand around on my feet for a 48-hour shift dealing with high-risk problems and real people all day. No thanks. I think they do it for pretty reasonable compensation considering.
  - user5994461 6y ago

Dumblydorr 6y ago

The difference is we entrust doctors with ethical and moral power predicated on hundreds of innovations which can kill or harm their patients. In contrast, we entrust SWEs with massively scaled applications with moral and ethical implications that can lead to societal change like misinformation and indirect death. Hmmm.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

Medicine does have a strong culture of ongoing technical interviewing. The OSCI is done on a weekly basis by most first and second-year medical students in the US. By the time you come in contact with real patients (as a student), you've done the equivalent of nearly a hundred technical interviews. It's increasingly common to be doing them both in Spanish and English as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_structured_clinical_examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_structured_clinical_... "It is designed to test clinical skill performance and competence in skills such as communication, clinical examination, medical procedures prescription, exercise prescription, joint mobilisation/manipulation techniques, radiographic positioning, radiographic image evaluation, and interpretation of results." "An OSCE usually comprises a circuit of short (the usual is 5–10 minutes although some use up to 15 minute) stations, in which each candidate is examined on a one-to-one basis with one or two impartial examiner(s) and either real or simulated (actors or electronic patient simulators) patients. Each station has a different examiner, as opposed to the traditional method of clinical examinations where a candidate would be assigned to an examiner for the entire examination. Candidates rotate through the stations, completing all the stations on their circuit. In this way, all candidates take the same stations. It is considered to be an improvement over traditional examination methods because the stations can be standardised enabling fairer peer comparison and complex procedures can be assessed without endangering patients health."

chrisseaton 6y ago

Doctors do have side projects, though. I even worked with a doctor on a mutual side project https://chrisseaton.com/merseyburns/ https://chrisseaton.com/merseyburns/. And guess what? Based on the strength of that side project the doctors I worked with now have jobs related to what they did in the side project! It's literally no different.

jbandela1 6y ago

Actually, these kind of stuff do get asked at the various interviews to becoming a doctor. * Working for free because it is a passion. Actually a big part of the medical school interview is making sure you are passionate about medicine. You are pretty much expected to be doing some type of medical volunteering on an ongoing basis to demonstrate your passion. In addition, once you are in medical school, interviewing for residency, demonstrating passion by volunteering or leading a journal club is often a big boost to your chances. * Whiteboards As part of the USMLE (US Medical License Exam) there is a clinical skills section. You go into a recorded room with a standardized patient who pretends to have a certain illness. You are expected to ask them the right questions and do the correct exam. You are graded on how well you do. In addition, before you can get board certified in your specialty (especially in surgery) and be allowed to practice on your own without any supervision, you undergo what are called oral exams. It is kind of like whiteboarding. There you are given hypothetical patient cases and are asked to walk through how you would diagnose it. What questions will you ask, what exams would you do, what imaging or other tests would you order. You are also asked about your treatment plan. If you are a surgeon, you will be asked to walk through how you would do the surgery, including what type of incision and the surgical approach. The examiners may throw in some complications (such as a lot of bleeding) and ask how you would deal with it. In reality, the medical doctor interviews are much more demanding than the software developer interviews. Source: I am a medical doctor and software developer and have done both the doctor interviews and the whiteboard interviews.

isochronous 6y ago
There's a big difference between job interviews and school interviews/oral exams, though.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Somehow I feel like you're right, but when I think about it I can't really think of why. What is actually different? The only major distinction I can come up with is that part of a job interview is seeing if you fit well with the culture of the company.

juancn 6y ago

On the other hand, if software developer were trained as doctors... Doctors spend many years doing hands-on work under more experienced doctors, free clinic hours, 30+ hours shifts, lot's of grunt work and specializing on a very narrow field. They end up training for 10-15 years at least before they can really be independent. Lots of people show up at software engineering interviews with barely any training, and sometimes with really bad habits. If you do a lot of interviewing, you'll find there's many people who have been working for years, basically ripping off employers, and in many ways they're unaware of their shortcomings. The saddest cases are when you have someone with some seniority, smart and some potential, but they grew up alone (to put it somehow). Either without a mentor (where they're smart but work in a vacuum) or with a bad mentor and picked enough bad habits to make them dangerous. They have so many things to unlearn, that you should hire them for a much junior position than their resume experience would indicate. In general that's a no hire situation, it's much better to hire inexperienced developers and just train them properly.

reportgunner 6y ago

There are many professions we could compare to each other. This is just a passive aggressive way to deal with not having side projects.