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A doctor told a programmer friend once, "I have to fix problems that God gave us. You have to fix problems you give yourselves."
by david927 12y ago
A doctor told a programmer friend once, "I have to fix problems that God gave us. You have to fix problems you give yourselves."
- adamnemecek 12y agoThat doctor sounds a bit like an arrogant douche.
- binarytrees 12y agoa tip of that hat
- thirsteh 12y ago"It's not exactly brain surgery, is it?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
- _lce0 12y agoI wonder if the teams at NASA, working on rocket science says "it's not rocket science, you know"
- singlow 12y agoI have a relative who works for Raytheon as a physicist on rocket systems. Whenever he tells be about a dumb mistake he had to fix, he always uses that expression.. followed by, "Oh wait, I guess it is."
- randlet 12y agoTo be fair, doctors are often fixing problems we've created ourselves too.
- a_dutch_guy 12y agoGod on HN? Come on, the world isn't flat anymore.
- jacquesm 12y agoYou don't have to take that literally in order to understand it, but just in case you really missed the point: the doctor is essentially saying that he is dealing with problems that have no direct cause or architect that he can consult whereas the IT people have essentially only themselves to blame and have made the mess they're in (usually) rather than that it has been handed down to them through the mists of time or from above. In a general sense that is true but in a more specific sense it is definitely possible to be handed a project without docs and horrible problems and it might as well be an organic problem. Even so, the simplest biology dwarfs the largest IT systems in complexity.
- a_dutch_guy 12y agoOf course I am not taking it literally. But he does mention God. Being a technical guy Stephen Hawking makes much more sense to me than God.
- iamcreasy 12y ago> Even so, the simplest biology dwarfs the largest IT systems in complexity. Well said.
- dasil003 12y ago> Even so, the simplest biology dwarfs the largest IT systems in complexity. And also mercifully in continuous real-world testing over time with no Big Rewrite to be seen. While an individual organism might have unsolvable problems, nature doesn't have the same tolerance for utterly intractable systems that we sometimes see in the software community.
- justathrow2k 12y agoOh, look, someone who has proven that God doesn't exist. Please, post the proof for all of us to see.
- lucozade 12y agoWith my 2015 budget and 2015 requirements, I'm going to need a few miracles.
- navan 12y agoIn a way both are fixing bugs created by someone else.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ploxiln 12y agoMy mother, a family practitioner, sometimes gets a patient which is on 15 or so different medications, all prescribed by different specialists at different times. She whittles it down to 3 or 4, and they get a lot better.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoMy doctor for one, would benefit most from fixing his own basic problems than from dwelling on God or what problems God has given us, but like most doctors he pretends to solve big problems while saying pretentious things. I'm just saying you'd expect these doctor types to have the greater powers of analysis, but in my experience they just pretend harder. [Edit to remove that off putting stuff]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- andrewchambers 12y agoThat doctor is wrong. All human problems are caused by the constraints of our physical world.
- dredmorbius 12y agoEspecially gross oversimplifications of reality and absolute statements.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoThat's why God endows them with greater analytical prowess.