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Comment by IllegalAlien | Hacker News Reader

You couldn't be more wrong.

Lawyers take their work home with them every day. They never have any rest at all, because they have to respect certain deadlines and they have multiple clients breathing down their neck. Next to that, there's also the question of morality: Sometimes a lawyer has to make immoral decisions to get the right outcome. This is especially true in penal law.

Doctors have to face the consequences of wrong diagnoses. If one of the patients dies because of an error the doctor made, you can be damn sure he'll carry that mistake with him for the rest of his life. Not only morally, but also legally and it could be a possible career killer.

Programmers have it the easiest, they only have computational problems to worry about. While programming is without a doubt strenuous on the mind, it is by no means affected by morality and therefore incomparable to practicing law or medicine.

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My wife and I retained a business lawyer earlier this year. I would email questions/documents at all hours of the day because it was easiest for me at the time. I knew lawyers typically worked long hours so I was never surprised when I got responses at 7 or 8 at night. However, when I got one at 11 PM on a Saturday I sent him a note saying none of this was time sensitive and I was fine if he just answered during business hours.

His paraphrased response:

I appreciate it, but I'm in the office regardless so I'd rather keep on top of all my clients' correspondence at the same time.

I occasionally have a cigar with a coworker of his in another department (how we got the referral originally), and his plans the last time we were out at approximately 4 PM on a Sunday was to head back for the office "for a quick 5 or 6 hours."

They're both newish associates so I'm sure they're trying to make an impression, but the hours attorneys put in is often staggering, especially at the lower end of the corporate ladder.

My wife is a young lawyer, so I see this firsthand. Not only are the hours long, but they're tracked in six minute intervals.

The mental burden of knowing there's an opportunity cost for going to the bathroom or taking a 15 minute break during the day looks so terribly draining.

If a lawyer goes to the bathroom, the client is likely still being billed for that.

Not if you have an honest lawyer.

Our associate billed $185/hr. His boss (Partner and in charge of the biz group) billed $345/hr.

The firm is not going into the red because the associate goes #2 and doesn't bill the time. And at 90+ hours a week their future at the firm is not going to hinge on that amount of billed time.

As a physician and code slinger, I will say that I often worry about my patients, my servers, my partners, my code, my projects...

Part of doing tough complex things is worrying if you are making the right decisions. If a patient dies inappropriately, that can be career ending. If my server crumbles or leaks private information, that too can be career ending.

While both could be career ending, a patient dying would probably make you feel a lot worse than a machine not doing what it should, right?

In general, of course.

But if you had a database of 1000s of people with STDs, how many lives might get destroyed if that got hacked?

...and how many saved? Its a trolly-car problem.

this.

an immediate family member is a prosecutor. as a software engineer who loves hard problems and agree that few professions rival the mental strain of holding that problem in memory, but i can attest as to just how strong the parallels are between trial prep and architecting complex technical solutions. I can't speak for doctors, but the mental models required for non-trivial jury trails could rival those i've encountered during my career as a software engineer. one could probably even argue the analogy the lead prosecutor is a backed developer building system of arguments for logic meeting definition of law, ensuring redundancy and failover in event of error condition (new evidence, evidence struck, motions, etc), all while playing role of pm+designer creating the interface delivering accessible content in a way meaningful to the user (jury). again, i can't comment on other professions, but capital cases were the closest thing i've seen to hours/stress/effort of early stage start ups--with the difference being failure meant you live knowing a murder/rapist walked free, instead of a shitty exit or returning to a "boring" enterprise job.

and then there's the imprint left once the project/trial is over. over the years, i've noticed that interesting/hard problems (the ones we dream about) tend to leave an imprint on my thought process on how i view complexity (e.g. the world). except for us developers/engineers, we just carry some vignette of organizing complexity, instead of being haunted by nauseatingly detailed accounts of how some asshole murdered his wife and children, or other sickening acts that prosecutors, cops, journalists, etc are required to become immersed into the details of.

now that i think about this, it's almost funny how easy we engineers/developers/designers have it.

When all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.

I agree with you that Lawyers and Doctors have to deal with moral issues, but some programmers have to deal with this as well. In the past, I've worked at companies that built software for check cashing/payday loans services and I can tell you first hand, that I felt disgusted with myself on a daily basis when I left work.

It wasn't that I wanted to do it, but I had to have a job to support my family. Needless to say, I quickly found another job.

> Lawyers take their work home with them every day.

But how long does each case take?

> Doctors have to face the consequences of wrong diagnoses.

I found this:

> Medical misconduct is defined as behavior that deviates from duty by a healthcare professional. Examples of medical misconduct include, but are not limited to the following: practicing as a healthcare professional fraudulently, practicing with gross incompetence or medical negligence, practicing while impaired by alcohol, drugs, physical or mental disability, being convicted of a crime, filing a false report; guaranteeing that treatment will result in a cure, refusing to provide services because of race, creed, color or national origin, performing services that are not authorized by the patient, harassing, abusing or intimidating a patient, ordering excessive tests, and/or abandoning or neglecting a patient in need of immediate care.

It is a bit more subtle, but it seems that if doctors just follow the book, they will be fine.

My personal experience with doctors is that they always have to look my data up. Every time I visit one, I hear: "let's see what case we have here" (and looks at computer screen).

> if doctors just follow the book, they will be fine.

If a doctor doesn't feel event the slightest twinge of regret or "what if..." when a patient dies, even if they did everything perfect, they very well may be a sociopath.

I don't think they should be wracked with guilt for years, not at all. But we're not just talking about legal repercussions. The cognitive load of someone dying while directly under your care has to be staggering.

1. Honestly? Years. Sadly courts don't work as quickly as television series suggest. Every case has a number of deadlines for appealing, pleading, etc. Also, a very high number of cases are handled simultaneously by one lawyer. This one of the reasons why young associates burn out pretty easily.

2. Medical misconduct as defined by law, with some examples included (a non-exhaustive list). What is your point with this? That article is purportedly vague so that medical accidents could be judged on a case by case basis. In other words, if the opposition has a good lawyer, you're screwed.

And you're forgetting the point of my post. Even if the doctor didn't do anything wrong legally, he'll still be haunted by the loss of a patient if he could have prevented it somehow.

You're conflating 'misconduct' and 'incorrect diagnosis'

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