4 ms·

Doctors are not as interchangeable as say assembly line workers, doctors have different levels of experience and different specializations as well as relationsh

by jiggy2011 13y ago

Doctors are not as interchangeable as say assembly line workers, doctors have different levels of experience and different specializations as well as relationships with patients in cases of more general doctors. Besides there is a relatively small pool of people compared to the general population who are even capable of becoming doctors, not to mention the very long spin up time. An analogy would be breaking down the tasks performed by a doctor into chunks that could be done in isolation by minimum wage workers.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
Two doctors are not interchangeable, but two radiologists are. The fact that they both make $300k/year doesn't change this.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  I imagine radiologists are interchangeable in the same way that Python programmers are; kind of but not really. Skilled professionals become more experienced at their jobs over time, they also have differing experiences and may have graduated from different schools etc. This means that they will perform their jobs differently in ways that way be subtle and not easily quantifiable. So if you swap them out, things will change in ways that may not be easy to predict. On the other hand a minimum wage worker is more likely to perform a job that requires a total training of 1 hour or less and they are likely to hit a ceiling in terms of productivity within a week. There may be minor differences in output, but these are easily quantifiable and if you have a large enough labour pool to draw from can be solved by saying "fire anybody who does like than X per hour".
  - jbooth 13y ago
    It seems to me (corrections welcome), that medical specialists are way, way more interchangeable than programmers. Each patient has a chart that follows them around through the hospital and each specialist reads the chart, makes their decisions and documents what they're doing. There are problems with that, but it's the system. That very much makes the medical practitioners cogs in the system, compared to programmers who have a much longer ramp up time for a given codebase/patient.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      Sure and every codebase has documentation , specs and tests that follow it all over the internet.. I think the main difference probably comes down to medicine having more procedures and redundancy built in because you can't let a patient die when a particular doctor is not available. OTOH my older relatives definitely complain about/praise individual doctors for bedside manor , professionalism and misdiagnosis etc.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    I'd actually expect radiologists to be considerably more interchangeable. The goal of a radiologist is to compute a function - `isCancer(mri)` or `isBrokenBone(xray)`. As a thought experiment, consider two radiologists who are as accurate as physics allows - they will always return the same answer for `isHerniatedDisk(mri)`. Medicine is high skill, but the outputs are fairly homogeneous. Homogeneous output is what makes workers interchangeable cogs, not skill level.
derleth 13y ago
> An analogy would be breaking down the tasks performed by a doctor into chunks that could be done in isolation by minimum wage workers. Which would be amazingly hard for all the same reasons writing a program to replace a doctor would be amazingly hard. In a company like Walmart, which is entirely predicated on the existence of interchangeable minimum-wage workers, the main component they can't replace is the process all those workers follow which results in a working store. That's the software run by all the human hardware.

yummyfajitas 13y ago

Two doctors are not interchangeable, but two radiologists are. The fact that they both make $300k/year doesn't change this.

jiggy2011 13y ago
I imagine radiologists are interchangeable in the same way that Python programmers are; kind of but not really. Skilled professionals become more experienced at their jobs over time, they also have differing experiences and may have graduated from different schools etc. This means that they will perform their jobs differently in ways that way be subtle and not easily quantifiable. So if you swap them out, things will change in ways that may not be easy to predict. On the other hand a minimum wage worker is more likely to perform a job that requires a total training of 1 hour or less and they are likely to hit a ceiling in terms of productivity within a week. There may be minor differences in output, but these are easily quantifiable and if you have a large enough labour pool to draw from can be solved by saying "fire anybody who does like than X per hour".
- jbooth 13y ago
  It seems to me (corrections welcome), that medical specialists are way, way more interchangeable than programmers. Each patient has a chart that follows them around through the hospital and each specialist reads the chart, makes their decisions and documents what they're doing. There are problems with that, but it's the system. That very much makes the medical practitioners cogs in the system, compared to programmers who have a much longer ramp up time for a given codebase/patient.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Sure and every codebase has documentation , specs and tests that follow it all over the internet.. I think the main difference probably comes down to medicine having more procedures and redundancy built in because you can't let a patient die when a particular doctor is not available. OTOH my older relatives definitely complain about/praise individual doctors for bedside manor , professionalism and misdiagnosis etc.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  I'd actually expect radiologists to be considerably more interchangeable. The goal of a radiologist is to compute a function - `isCancer(mri)` or `isBrokenBone(xray)`. As a thought experiment, consider two radiologists who are as accurate as physics allows - they will always return the same answer for `isHerniatedDisk(mri)`. Medicine is high skill, but the outputs are fairly homogeneous. Homogeneous output is what makes workers interchangeable cogs, not skill level.

derleth 13y ago

> An analogy would be breaking down the tasks performed by a doctor into chunks that could be done in isolation by minimum wage workers. Which would be amazingly hard for all the same reasons writing a program to replace a doctor would be amazingly hard. In a company like Walmart, which is entirely predicated on the existence of interchangeable minimum-wage workers, the main component they can't replace is the process all those workers follow which results in a working store. That's the software run by all the human hardware.