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HN likes to downplay this, apparantly, but not everything can be boiled down to bureaucracy. Yes, medical professionals use checklists. They also have a harsh

HN likes to downplay this, apparantly, but not everything can be boiled down to bureaucracy. Yes, medical professionals use checklists. They also have a harsh and very unforgiving culture that fosters craftsmanship and values professionalism above all else. You see this in other high-stakes professions too. You cannot just take the checklist and ignore the relentless focus on quality, the feelings of personal failure and countless hours honing and caring for the craft. Developers are notorious for being lazy AF, so it's not hard to explain our obsession with "just fix the system". It's a required but not sufficient condition.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
'The system' includes the attitudes of developers and people that pay them. Everyone takes job of a medical proffesional seriously, from the education to the hospitals that enmloys them to the lawmakers to the patients. When you pick a surgeon, you avoid the ones that killed people. Do you avoid developers that introduce bugs? We don't even keep track of that! You can have the license taken away as a surgeon, I've never heard of anyone becoming unemployable as a developer. You are not gonna get an equivalent outcome even if tomorrow all developers show up to work with an attitude of a heart surgeon. However if suddenly all data loss and data breaches would result in massive compensation, and if slow and buggy software resulted in real lawsuits, you would see the results very quickly. Basically same issues as in trading securities: no accountability for either developers or the decision makers.
mr_toad 6y ago
> medical professionals operate in an environment where they don’t fully understand the systems they’re working with (human biology still has many unknowns), and many mistakes are irreversible. If you look at the worst performing IT departments, they suffer from the same problems: they don’t fully understand how their systems work, and they lack easy ways to reverse changes.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

'The system' includes the attitudes of developers and people that pay them. Everyone takes job of a medical proffesional seriously, from the education to the hospitals that enmloys them to the lawmakers to the patients. When you pick a surgeon, you avoid the ones that killed people. Do you avoid developers that introduce bugs? We don't even keep track of that! You can have the license taken away as a surgeon, I've never heard of anyone becoming unemployable as a developer. You are not gonna get an equivalent outcome even if tomorrow all developers show up to work with an attitude of a heart surgeon. However if suddenly all data loss and data breaches would result in massive compensation, and if slow and buggy software resulted in real lawsuits, you would see the results very quickly. Basically same issues as in trading securities: no accountability for either developers or the decision makers.

mr_toad 6y ago

> medical professionals operate in an environment where they don’t fully understand the systems they’re working with (human biology still has many unknowns), and many mistakes are irreversible. If you look at the worst performing IT departments, they suffer from the same problems: they don’t fully understand how their systems work, and they lack easy ways to reverse changes.